What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer’s imagination that I set the most high.
My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.
Radio, sewing machine, bookends, ironing board and that great big piano lamp – peace, that’s what I like. Butterbean vines planted all along the front where the strings are.
Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.
For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.
I believe in it, and I trust it too and treasure it above everything, the personal, the personal, the personal! I put my faith in it not only as the source, the ground of meaning in art, in life, but as the meaning itself.
What we know about writing the novel is the novel.
Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn’t know but the other character does know.
There’s still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I’d gotten sunburned.
Integrity can be neither lost nor concealed nor faked nor quenched nor artificially come by nor outlived, nor, I believe, in the long run, denied.
Beware of a man with manners.
A whole tree of lightning stood in the sky. She kept looking out the window, suffused with the warmth from the fire and with the pity and beauty and power of her death. The thunder rolled.
Once you’re into a story everything seems to apply-what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you’re writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.
The greatest mystery is unsheathed reality itself.
No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.
Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.
The first act of insight is throw away the labels.
Look for where the sky is brightest along the horizon. That reflects the nearest river. Strike out for a river and you will find habitation.
From the first I was clamorous to learn...
Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood’s learning is made up of moments. It isn’t steady. It’s a pulse.