About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.
Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
No one can help you if you’re stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work’s possibilities.
The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.
By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha’s bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.
I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
Johnston’s books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet.
Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world’s skin ever expanding?
I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.
Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.
For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.