A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere.
Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.
We write to discover what we think.
I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don’t read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn’t what I want to write.
One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.
I always want everything read in one sitting. If they can’t read it in one sitting, you’re going to lose the rhythm of it. You’re going to lose the shape of it.
Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. I think biographies are very urgent to children.
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
I don’t write for catharsis; I have to write to understand.
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.
Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
When I’m working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance.
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.