That’s the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they’ve been all along.
Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.
She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present.
You learn to write by doing it.
Art is not a mirror but an icon. It takes the chaos in which we live and shows us structure and pattern, not the structure of conformity which imprisons but the structure which liberates, sets us free to become growing, mature human beings.
If our love for each other really is participatory, then all other human relationships nourish it; it is inclusive, never exclusive.
My protagonists, male and female, are me.
No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I’ve been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover.
The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of paradox and contradiction. It is only a shallow character who offers us no problems of contrast.
An artist is someone who cannot rest, who can never rest as long as there is one suffering creature in the world.
Hate hurts the hater more’n the hated.
A book comes and says, ‘Write me.’ My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.
The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.
Maybe that’s the best part of going away for a vacation-coming home again.
Darkness was and darkness was good. As with light. Light and Darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being, in joyful rhythm.
I do not know everything; still many things I understand.
This wasn’t the first time that I’d come close to death, but it was the first time I’d been involved in this part of it, this strange, terrible saying goodbye to someone you’ve loved.
My lovely shining fragile broken house is filled with flowers and founded on a rock.
People are more than just the way they look.
Like and equal are two entirely different things.