The received truth of history is shot through and falsified by unknown secrets carried to the grave.
When you have never done a thing before and that thing is not simply and clearly right or wrong, you frequently do not know if it is a cruel thing, you just go ahead and do it. Maybe later you’ll be able to determine whether you acted cruelly. Too late, of course, but at least you’ll know.
When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike.
Our obsession with each other was like the isolation that comes with great pain; it was like extreme sadness. Without our children we might have never discovered our differences, which is what has made our abiding love for each other possible.
I’ve got nothing against outsiders, per se, you understand. It’s just that you have to love a town before you can live in it right, and you have to live in it before you can love it right. Otherwise, you’re a parasite of sorts.
But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.
Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It’s done all right on its own so far.
Nobody does anything for one reason.
But on the other hand, I don’t actively seek out stories or hunt them down.
A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
Much more than memoir; it’s history.
There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
It’s hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter.
Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men – at least he always did when he was a kid – because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives.
Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.