Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.
The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society’s logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in a politics of sex.
Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting-far, far away-what you last met at home.
Time at length becomes justice.
Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
I read in desperate snatches in the interstices of the Quotidian, and dream of finding three uninterrupted quiet hours to think, moon, mentally maunder, and, above all, write. I am pursued by an anti-Muse; her name is Life. Her homely multisyllabic surname is often left unenunciated, but to certain initiates it may be whispered: Exigency.
Admittedly, there is always a golden age, the one not ours, the one that once was or will someday be. One’s own time is never satisfactory, except to the very rich or the smugly oblivious.
People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.
I write in terror... I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence, sometimes every syllable.
It had always been my habit – privately I felt it to be an ecstasy – to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. I was drawn to books that had been read before, novels that girls like myself had cradled and cherished. In my mind – I suppose in my isolation – I seized on all those previous readers, and everyone who would read after me, as phantom companions and secret friends.
If a novel’s salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.
The ground was scorched, the streets teemed with refugees, and these Americans were playing at fleeing! As if they had something to resent, to despise, to scorn, to run away from! As if they weren’t the lords of the earth.
I work from a different theory. For everything there’s a bad way of describing, also a good way. You pick the good way, you get along better.
By replacing history with fantasy, the Palestinians have invented a society unlike any other, where hatred trumps bread. They have reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors.
You can never tell how genes ricochet.
Brilliant students make good aides.
Get thee to the novel! – the novel, that word-woven submarine, piloted by intimation and intuition, that will dive you to the deeps of the heart’s maelstrom.
Death’s reliable.
She thought: How hard it is to change one’s life. And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.
Because she fears the past she distrusts the future – it, too, will turn into the past.