Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.
I wish I had the boy.
I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel, she said. I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her.
Finishing is what you have to do. If you don't finish, nothing is worth a damn
Everybody had his arms on everybody else’s shoulders, and they were all singing. Mike was sitting at the table with several men in their shirt-sleeves, eating from a bowl of tuna fish, chopped onions...
Don't think, old man, he said aloud. Sail on this course and take it when it comes.
Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.
Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.
But perhaps he had enough animal strength and detached intelligence that he could make another start.
But now he said his thoughts aloud many times since there was no one that they could annoy.
Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slip-over jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a rac...
Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence. Continence is the foe of heresy.
Because she had done the best she could for many years back and the way they were together now was no one person's fault.
Augustin stood there looking down at him and cursed him speaking slowly clearly bitterly and contemptuously and cursing as steadily as though he were dumping manure on a field lifting it with a dung f...
And we'll never love anyone else but each other.
And we could have all this,' she said. 'And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.''What did you say?''I said we could have everything.''We can have everything.''No, we can...
And just then it occurred to him that he was going to die. It came with a rush; not as a rush of water nor of wind; but of a sudden, evil-smelling emptiness and the odd thing was that the hyena slippe...
All you get in this life is a point of view.
All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the cl...
A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine glasses.