American houses... ′ she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. ‘They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?
Thirty years – almost all of them really happy. That’s a lifetime, it’s incredible. Most people don’t get that. But maybe this is just over, you know? Maybe it’s over...
E in passato, si chiese Archie, la gente imbrogliava di meno? Era piu’ onesta, lasciava la porta di casa aperta, affidava i figli ai vicini, faceva visite agli amici, aveva il conto aperto con il macellaio?
Here lie a man and a woman. The man is more beautiful than the woman. And for this reason there have been times when the woman has feared that she loves the man more than he loves her. He has always denied this.
Nobody can cast themselves out.
And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems some long, dirty lie... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?
Overnight everyone has grown up. While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
Time is how you spend your love.
When people use that stream of consciousness, it’s kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
The past is always tense, the future perfect.
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
Don’t confuse honours with achievement.
I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
It’s got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can’t get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people’s minds. I can’t live my life like that.
Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That’s no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
Pulchritude – beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis’s essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn’t sound like me.