Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.
This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can’t escape. Life was easier then. You just didn’t pick up the phone.
Yet the fact had no consciousness of itself except through me.
To love life for some men is to love fighting, for fighting, and not love, is seen as man’s deepest passion.
Ambitious, absorbing, and poignantly moving.
There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.
Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.
It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can’t know it will be the last.
Food doesn’t exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented.
Better to be despised, then, than to be ignored; or damned with condescending praise.
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.