I’ve never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people’s computers as a bystander. A few times in my life I’ve opened email accounts, twice actually, but it’s something I don’t want in my life right now.
The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.
Writing is one of the most assertive things a person can do.
I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories.
Sexy means loving someone you donot know.
In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.
You remind me of everything that followed.
And yet he had loved her. A Bookish girl heedless of her beauty, unconscious of her effect. She’d been prepared to live her life alone but from the moment he’d known her he’d needed her.
Isolation offered its own form of companionship.
She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.
A writer has to true to him or herself. Period. That’s it!
Gogol is unaccustomed to this sort of talk at mealtimes, to the indulgent ritual of the lingering meal, and the pleasant aftermath of bottles and crumbs and empty glasses that clutter the table.
For that story, I took as my subject a young woman whom I got to know over the course of a couple of visits. I never saw her having any health problems – but I knew she wanted to be married.
On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in bowl.
She had listened to him, partly sympathetic, partly horrified. For it was one thing for her to reject her background, to be critical of her family’s heritage, another to hear it from him.
He tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past.
One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist.
The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters-it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too son and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness.
Do what I will never do.
She supposed that all those years of loving a person who was dishonest had taught her a few things.