Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
It should surprise no one that the life of the writer – such as it is – is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
Your feelings are none of your business.
A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order – willed, faked, and so brought into being.
You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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.