You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality.
If you write a hundred short stories and they’re all bad, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. You fail only if you stop writing.
My characters talk to one another, and when it reaches a certain pitch of excitement I jump out of bed and run and trap them before they are gone.
The human race likes to give itself airs. One good volcano can produce more greenhouse gases in a year than the human race has in its entire history.
The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.
It could reach up and grab the moon.
Like every beginner, I have thought you could beat, pummel and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.
I’m being ironic. Don’t interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it’s not polite. There!
I wonder how many men, hiding their youngness, rise as I do, Saturday mornings, filled with the hope that Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck will be there waiting as our one true always and forever salvation?
He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out.
We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose.
The gift of life is so precious that we should feel an obligation to pay back the universe for the gift of being alive.
Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.
So there you have it, a lifetime of first smelling the books, they all smell wonderful, reading the books, loving the books, and remembering the books.
And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.
I’m not anyone, I’m just myself; whatever I am, I am something, and now I’m something you can’t help.
The train skimmed on softly, slithering, black pennants fluttering, black confetti lost on its own sick-sweet candy wind, down the hill, with the two boys pursuing, the air was so cold they ate ice cream with each breath.
He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.
Good writers touch life often.
It is good to renew one’s wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all.