See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there’s a reason. There has to be.
I never change, I simply become more myself.
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.
Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.
Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort – these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work.
Running! If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think of what it might be.
A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?
And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo – that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.
Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn’t have the personality of a politician. We don’t see the world that simply.
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can’t see, whose beginning you’ve forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.
A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.
For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.
You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There’s a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can’t alter.
Only when men are connected to large, universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity.
The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to “overcome” doubt.
Fiction that adds up, that suggests a “logical consistency,” or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.
Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.
Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.
The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.