And I think that’s important, to know how the water’s gone over the dam before you start to describe it. It helps to have been over the dam yourself.
Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.
Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
It’s easier to die if others around you are dying.
All the travelin I ever done is going around the coffeepot looking for the handle.
Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart. “I’m coming back some day,” they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore.
I would rather be dead than not read.
And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.
There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.
I think it’s important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.
Archie was an expert at dividing the affairs of life into men’s business and women’s business. An empty cupboard and a full plate were the man’s business, a full cupboard and an empty plate the concern of the woman.
What we fear we often rage against.
I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.
It is my feeling that a story is not finished until it is read, and that the reader finishes it through his or her life experience, prejudices, world view and thoughts.
I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language.
If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they’ll be in the right place.
In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.
A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.
If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here it was as though he had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it.
Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.