Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you...
Art is not sin. It’s not always good. But it is not a sin.
And so I do. When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my h...
All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn’t listen to, won’t remember, never got right, wasn’t around for. All
All of the love and the longing a body can contain was spun into not more than two and a half minutes of song, and when she came to the highest notes it seemed that all they had been given in their li...
The story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale, the German kind, unsweetened by Disney.
Stopped by this. Even she, who knew next to nothing
My desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure the job i...
Finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling,’ Doyle said from memory. ‘ Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.
You keep someone always for what he or she is worth to you, for what you can trade her for, money or freedom or somebody else you want more. Any person can be a kind of trading chip when you find a wa...
You can learn more, and more quickly, from other people’s missteps than from their successes. If
Why, she wanted to ask them, with all the empty stools to choose from, would they want to sit so close? She
What you have to remember about your mother is that she didn’t have her own character. She turned into whoever she was sitting next to. When
What would it mean to kiss the lips that had held such a sound?
To say it was a beautiful day would not begin to explain it. It was that day when the end of summer intersects perfectly with the start of fall .... [p.218 ff.]
They had wanted to go to the barn and brush the horses. If they brushed the horses and mucked out a few of the stalls then usually Ned would let them take turns riding the mare for the afternoon. But...
They didn't account for Lucy, only for her face. And maybe they couldn't. She was too huge for casual consideration. But how can you operate on the face without understanding what the face means to th...
There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.
There are always those perfect times with the people we love, those moments of joy and equality that sustain us later on...These moments are the foundation upon which we build the house that will shel...