She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.
Henry James said there isn't any difference between the English novel and the American novel since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.
Then the light changed the water, until all about them the woods in the rising wind seemed to grow taller and blow inward together and suddenly turn dark. The rain struck heavily. A huge tail seemed t...
I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
I'm a great reader that never has time to read.
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening childre...
All serious daring starts from within.
Out of love you can speak with straight fury.
Never think you've seen the last of anything.
Children like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way all over again.
A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.
When they turned off, it was still early in the pink and green fields. The fumes of morning, sweet and bitter, sprang up where they walked. The insects ticked softly, their strength in reserve; butter...
The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.
Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams.
No art ever came out of not risking your neck.
It was my first-year Latin teacher in high school who made me who made me discover I'd fallen in love with it (grammar). It took Latin to thrust me into bona fide alliance with words in their true mea...
Through travel I first became aware of the outside world it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.
The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive...
I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.
Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it mo...