That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.
Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.
There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me.
The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.
And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
This is awful. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.
It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.
Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
I am a cigarette with a body attached to it.
That morning she pours Teacher’s over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.
Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window – maybe rearrange all the furniture.
A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.
Art doesn’t have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.
I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it’s good for the circulation.
Nights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if it’d really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.
In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.
Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.
Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.