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...
For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.
At the sting in her eyes, she remembered for him that there must be no tears in his.
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.
There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
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...
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...
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...
When somebody, no matter who, gives everything, it makes people feel ashamed for him.
For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives.
And who could ever remember any of the things he says? They are just inspired remarks that roll out of his mouth like smoke.
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...
Up home we loved a good storm coming, we’d fly outdoors and run up and down to meet it, her mother used to say. We children would run as fast as we could go along the top of that mountain when the win...
I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other
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.
Each day the storm clouds were opening like great purple flowers and pouring out their dark thunder. Each nightfall, the storm was laid down on their houses like a burden the day had carried.
Welcome! I said—the most dangerous word in the world.