I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from Bunny Brown and His Sist...
Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the powe...
Welcome! I said—the most dangerous word in the world.
For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.
The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order ... the continuous thread of revelation.
You know, sir, this operation is not, in any hands, a hundred percent predictable?Well, I'm an optimist.I didn't know there were any more such animals, said Dr. Courtland.Never think you've seen the l...
I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other
For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives.
At the sting in her eyes, she remembered for him that there must be no tears in his.
All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.
Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle...
People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.
No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.
People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel...but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make.
But he wanted to leap up, to say to her, I have been sick and I found out then, only then, how lonely I am. Is it too late? My heart puts up a struggle inside me, and you may have heard it, protesting...
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.
Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and...
When somebody, no matter who, gives everything, it makes people feel ashamed for him.
I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
And who could ever remember any of the things he says? They are just inspired remarks that roll out of his mouth like smoke.