The whole construct of my universe was a cunning, entangled network of lies. I had to start over again. I knew that. And I had to begin by ceasing to loathe myself for my difference from the rest.
I can forgive almost any crime if a great story is left in its wake.
The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean.
Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.
I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class.
He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart.
But let me begin with a statement of my own passionate and indignant belief – I do not care one goddamned thing about how James Dickey conducted his personal life. I care everything about what this man wrote on blank sheets of paper when he sat alone probing the extremities of imagination.
As we took the court for the second half, I made a secret now to myself that I would never listen to a single thing that Mel Thompson said to me again. I would obey him and honor him and follow him, but I would not let him touch the core of me again. He was my coach, but I was my master.
I have built a city from the books I’ve read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me.
Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.
I lit a cigarette and began puffing on it as I drank one quick beer after another. I was neither a drinker nor a smoker nor a fighter, but I had planned to be all three on this day.
I never once approached greatness, but toward the end of my career, I was always in the game.
I’m sorry your bad dream died,” I said as I left her and walked toward the gate. “And I’m sorry I ever met you, Annie Kate.
If your parents disapprove of you and are cunning with their disapproval, there will never come a new dawn when you can become convinced of your own value. There is no fixing a damaged childhood. The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float.
There’s the neurotic mother who’s so demanding that the sound of her voice over the phone can cause instant nausea in her daughters.
The reading of great books has been a life altering activity to me and, for better or worse, it brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I’ve had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.
Don’t go yet. Please. Tell me a story, one about us. Tell what it meant. How on earth did it happen? The story, Pat – tell it to me.
The writing of novels is one of the few ways I have found to approach the altar of God and Creation itself. You try to worship God by performing the singularly courageous and impossible favor of knowing yourself.
When you write by hand, you don’t have the excessive freedom of a computer. When I write down something, I have to be serious about it. I have to ask myself, “Is this necessary at this point in the book?
Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?