There are worries that seem to me sustained by the love of worry. For example, that people are reading from screens, or listening to recorded books. Why scold the impulse to enjoy language and narrative in whatever form it takes?
Characters more or less present themselves to me. I don’t know their origins. I think if I did, if I seemed to myself to fabricate them, I could not induce suspension of disbelief in myself in the way writing fiction requires.
I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. And I’ll tell you frankly, that was wonderful.
The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn’t one of them. Well, this world isn’t one either.
I read things like theology, and I read about science, Scientific American and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted.
It saddens me that Christians need to be reminded that awe is owed also to those who disagree with them, who believe otherwise than they do.
I like a book to be full of the memory of what it is, a voice in an endless conversation, and yet at the same time to be new.
Generosity is also an act of freedom, a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.
A letter makes ordinary things seem important.
The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another.
Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that.
That’s one good thing about the way life is, that no one can know you if you don’t let them.
Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.
I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation.
For our purposes as human beings, the mind is the center of everything.
There was some sort of maze-learning experiment involved in my final grade and since I remember the rat who was my colleague as uncooperative, or perhaps merely incompetent at being a rat, or tired of the whole thing, I don’t remember how I passed.
When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.
I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I’ve read.
Grace has a grand laughter in it.
It is possible to know the great truths without feeling the truth of them.