I never discuss a novel while I’m writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.
I think it’s the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don’t write very well.
When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing.
Alliteration seems to offend people.
Inaction counted as a choice.
Are you prepared for the first wound?
There are days when it seems to me that in literature the most convincing depiction of the world in which we live is to be found in the phantasmagorical kingdom through which Lewis Carroll took Alice on a tour.
I have learned a great deal from novels. Some of it is even true.
Southerners have many fine qualities, charm and civility among them, and a sense of the tragic...
A short-order cook, just off work, makes easy tracking for lions and worse.
They said there was no rest for the wicked. In fact, there was rest neither for the virtuous nor the wicked, nor for guys like Billy, who were uncommitted regarding the whole idea of virtue versus wickedness and who were just trying to do their jobs.
The brain acknowledged the approach of death while the heart stubbornly insisted upon immortality.
She lived for others, her heart tuned to their anguish and their needs.
Some days I’m lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.
Not all or even most suffering is at the hands of fate; it befalls us at our invitation.
I see dead people. But, then by God, I do something about it!
But victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring. Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity.
I can love October in September. September doesn’t care.
Then what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lector? You can’t eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.
Sometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared life more than death, light more than darkness, freedom more than surrender.