Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy.
It’s a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I’ve always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn’t matter what the lady believed.
And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.
I don’t ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man’s question. I ask whom did I live for.
Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.