On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.
Fame’s carapace does not allow for easy breathing.
What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen.
I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it’s about losing people you love.
The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It’s technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day-a way of relating.
The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.
Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.
The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.
I am always reading or thinking about reading.
You are writing for your contemporaries – not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.
The despairing soul is a rebel.
The innocence of such children doesn’t answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.
Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?
It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else’s private world with our own.
Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.
The regional voice is the universal voice.
How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called “sentences.” And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.
She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, “Why are you trying to starve yourself?” To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.
My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.
One of the large consolations for experiencing anything unpleasant is the knowledge that one can communicate it.