Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.
What a phrase that is: ‘that explains everything!’ I know better than to think anything ‘explains everything’ today.
Human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions.
There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.
You don’t have to be in the habit of going to church to listen to such a literary minister; you don’t have to be a believer to be moved by Mr. Buechner’s faith.
Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.
A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.
What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too.
Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you-because you know how to perform them-have no choice, either.
A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
The object of war is to survive it.
Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.
You don’t want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven’t done what I do. Most book reviewers haven’t written 11 novels. Many of them haven’t written one.
I suppose I’m proudest of my novels for what’s imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it – rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes.