I dressed and went for a walk – determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.
In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldnt turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.
When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.
Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He’d said he’d spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.
There’s literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn’t otherwise have.
There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
You’ve got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
She won’t give him back his look.
The smooth stones you pick up and examine under the moon’s light have been made blue from the sea. Next morning when you pull them from your trouser pocket, they are still blue.
What do any of us really know about love?
There is no answer. It’s okay. But even if it wasn’t okay, what am I supposed to do?
I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
I’d like to go out in the front yard and shout something. “None of this is worth it!” That’s what I’d like people to hear.
But he stays by the window, remembering that life. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else – the cold and where he’d go in it – was outside, for a while anyway.
There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.
What good are insights? They only make things worse.
There are significant moments in everyone’s day that can make literature. That’s what you ought to write about.
Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.
Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.