Happiness is endless hapiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.
Getting from La Jolla to Alta Vista State Hospital isn’t easy, unless you have a car or a breakdown. April’s Father had a breakdown and they got him there in no time.
But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is.
It was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you’ve snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of your line.
Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.
Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.
There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it’s why you want to become a writer – because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.
One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.
The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.
Real maturity is the ability to imagine the humanity of every person as fully as you believe in your own humanity.
Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.
Our memories tell us who we are and they cannot be achieved through committee work, by consulting other people about what happened. That doesn’t mean that at all times memories are telling us the absolute truth, but that the main source of who we are is that memory, flawed or not.
I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he’d led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity – its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.
One can imagine a world without essays. It would be a little poorer, of course, like a world without chess, but one could live in it.
You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.
I try to help people become the best possible editors of their own work, to help them become conscious of the things they do well, of the things they need to look at again, of the wells of material they have not even begun to dip their buckets into.
There’s no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.
When your power comes from others, on approval, you are their slave. Never sacrifice yourselves – never! Whoever urges you to self-sacrifice is worse than a common murderer, who at least cuts your throat himself, without persuading YOU to do it.
Because I don’t have to be careful of people’s feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I’m teaching writing.