There’s something flabby about teaching in a place like this,” He said. “If you don’t have to exert yourself once in a while, you begin–or at least I do–to feel like a headwaiter leading people to the second-best table.
If a person had accused him of meanness, he could have defended himself. But with a dog – you did something cheap to it when you were sure no one was looking, and it was as though you had done it in front of a mirror.
Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.
You’ll see some bad things, but if you didn’t see them, they’d still be happening.
There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one’s vision of the past.
A lie hides the truth. A story tries to find it.
The density of people in society is so thick that we forget that life will end one day. And we don’t know when that one-day will be. So please, tell the people you love and care for that they are special and important. Tell them, before it is too late.
I like to cook; it is, for me, a happy combination of mindlessness and purpose.
My first job was working in a dress shop in Los Angeles in 1940, for $7 a week.
I don’t know what makes a writer’s voice. It’s dozens of things. There are people who write who don’t have it. They’re tone-deaf, even though they’re very fluent. It’s an ability, like anything else, being a doctor or a veterinarian, or a musician.
I taught writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania for a number of years and I realized that all you can do is encourage people and give them assignments and hope they will write them.
I’ve always known a lot of very bad people, destructive, brutes of a certain kind. Then I’ve seen these lovely impulses and what not, and they’ve stayed with me and comforted me.
My father brought me a box of books once when I was about three and a half or four. I remember the carton they were in and the covers with illustrations by Newell C. Wyeth.
There’s a certain amount of tyranny in all of us to some extent, and in some people it’s much more developed than in others. It’s a different balance which makes us all different.
When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path.
People steal into one’s consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along.
You light a match and the house burns down.
When he had first known her, the violent decisiveness with which she judged people had charmed him. For Emma, people were enemies or protectors. Even though the charm had worn off, he sometimes envied her–her sense of others devoid of the kind of complex and enervating reflections he was given to–for within her limits she was clear while he, he thought, moved in a permanent blur.
She was thinking of the advantages she would have if only she were someone else.
She often told herself that story, easing herself into sleep, drifting off as she patched together the ghostly memory of someone in whose real existence she hardly believed any more.