The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn’t. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice – by work.
I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.
To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;.
Who was it said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?
Storytelling and elegant style don’t always go hand in hand.
Every new event – everything I did for the rest of my life – would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.
Always remember, the person we’re really working for is the person who’s restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He’s the one we want to impress.
There’s an expectation these days that novels – like any other consumer product – should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.
Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?
I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.
Anything is grand if it’s done on a large enough scale.
If he had his wits about him Bunny would surely keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.
One likes to think there’s something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I’ve learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn’t conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
My novels aren’t really generated by a single conceptual spark; it’s more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.
When I’m writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.
For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.
Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn’t be any other way.
Sometimes it’s about playing a poor hand well.
There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty-unless she is wed to something more meaningful-is always superficial.
All those layers of silence upon silence.