I was always my own teacher.
Passion is our ground, our island – do others exist?
Ah, I’m a woman that’s been clear around the world in my rocking chair, and I tell you we all get surprises now and then.
Both reading and writing are experiences – lifelong – in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.
Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.
At the time of writing, I don’t write for my friends or myself either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it.
Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.
My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make changes. I have always trusted this voice.
The first thing we see about a short story is its mystery. And in the best short stories, we return at the last to see mystery again.
Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.
Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t teach me how to write the next one.
The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
When I read, I hear what’s on the page. I don’t know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too.
Location pertains to feelings – feelings are bound up in place.
A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.
The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.
I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.
I’m a great reader that never has time to read.
Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?