I can’t play bridge. I don’t play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.
This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you’ve been driving for a long time – you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.
Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?
It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness – however temporary, however flimsy – of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another.
She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.
People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.
That’s something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.
She would live now, not read.
Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.
The stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.
My head was a magpie’s nest lined with such bright scraps of information.
Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.
I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.
Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.
The complexity of things – the things within things – just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?
There’s a kind of tension that if I’m getting a story right I can feel right away, and I don’t feel that when I try to write a novel. I kind of want a moment that’s explosive, and I want everything gathered into that.
Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.
The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.