Time is anonymous; when we give it a face, it’s the same face the world over.
Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.
I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.
All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.
People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.
Never think you’ve seen the last of anything.
Write about what you don’t know about what you know.
A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.
When I was a child and the snow fell, my mother always rushed to the kitchen and made snow ice cream and divinity fudge-egg whites, sugar and pecans, mostly. It was a lark then and I always associate divinity fudge with snowstorms.
To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.
The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what’s told alive.
Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.
There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told – returned to the world it came out of.
I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.
Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.
Out of love you can speak with straight fury.