I have closely noted that people who watch a great deal of TV never again seem able to adjust to the actual pace of life. The speed of the passing images becomes the speed the aspire to and they seem to develop an impatience and boredom with anything else.
We Americans are trained to think big, talk big, act big, love big, admire bigness but then the essential mystery is in the small.
Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.
I don’t see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.
The answer is always in the entire story, not a piece of it.
My advice is, do not try to inhabit another’s soul. You have your own.
The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit.
What cannot be said, will get wept.
All artists as a type seem to suffer a great deal, but then so do miners.
Zen is the vehicle of reality.
I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.
The world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions. That’s why I ran to the woods.
You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it.
The days are stacked against what we think we are.
That’s my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.
I can write anywhere.
How wonderful it was to love something without the compromise of language.
Marriage is survived just on the basis of ordinary etiquette, day in and day out. Also cooking together helps a lot.
I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.
No one else can hold your hand or take this voyage of the soul for you.