For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
But happiness, Albert knew, is something that appears to you suddenly, that is meant for you, a thing which you reach for and pick up and hide at your breast, a shiny thing that reminds you of something alive and leaping.
He looked home-made, as though his wife had self-consciously knitted or somehow contrived a husband when she sat alone at night.
It was in a place where the days would go by and surprise anyone that they were over.
When somebody, no matter who, gives everything, it makes people feel ashamed for him.
For he was not strong enough to receive the impact of unfamiliar things without a little talk to break their fall.
The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.
My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight.
We are the breakers of our own hearts.
I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.
The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.
If you haven’t surprised yourself, you haven’t written.
Insight doesn’t happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.
The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever lost.
One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.
She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.
No art ever came out of not risking your neck.
I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them – with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.