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.
My life was incoherent to me. I felt it quivering, spitting out broken teeth.
The truth came slowly like a story told by people interrupting each other.
Words are nets through which all truth escapes.
To be human is to be in a story.
Imagination has to do with one’s awareness of the reality of other people as well as of one’s own reality. Imagination is a bridge between the provincialism of the self and the great world.
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.
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.