That’s how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story.
He had senile dementia and liked to go outside naked, but he could still do two things perfectly: win at checkers and write out prescriptions.
Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.
Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It’s the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.
Pay attention to your passions. They are the key to starting and finishing the book you are meant to write. I don’t believe in talent. I believe in passion.
When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.
Plot comes first. The plot is the archictecture of your novel. You wouldn’t build a house without a plan. If I wrote without a plot, it would just be a pile of bricks. Characters are your servants. They must serve your plot.
If you’re writing, you’re a writer. If you’re talking about it or thinking about it, I’m not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.
There is something in us that loves certain disasters and the fever of this moment and surrendering to that.
Root out all the “to be” verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No “It was” or “they are” or “I am.” Don’t let it be, make it happen.
I have my own sheep and I literally sheer the sheep and knot sweaters for friends and family from scratch.
I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.
I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the discipline is to quit.
Quit smoking in the hope of growing old. It takes a long time to write. People go to books for wisdom and older authors tend to have more of it.
The longer you live, the more likely you are to have something to say.
In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it’s one of the few kinds of writing that doesn’t tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We’re surrounded by advertising.
But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after – oh, that’s love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she’s gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She’s the one you can’t put down.
Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job... And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another – that is surely the basic instinct... Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.
Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one, “My life; what I stole from history, and how I live with it.
Our holiday food splurge was a small crate of tangerines, which we found ridiculously thrilling after an eight-month abstinence from citrus... Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it as gently as a doll. Watching her do that as she sat cross-legged on the floor one morning in pink pajamas, with bliss lighting her cheeks, I thought: Lucky is the world, to receive this grateful child. Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.