Good writing should be grasped at once—in a second.
The most important things, I told them, were observation and consciousness. Keep your eyes open, see clearly, think about what you see, ask yourself what it means.
Minutes after the shootings, everybody’s cell phone rang.
I waited for dawn, but only because I had forgotten how hard mornings were. For a second I'd be normal. Then came the dim awareness of something off, out of place. Then the truth came crashing down an...
A neighbor once told me he had trouble with García Márquez’s novel because he likes to drink while he reads, and 'The Autumn of the Patriarch' gave him no space in which to take a sip of his beer.
Vinegar of the interrogator with the oil of a flirt,
Reading was like eating alone, with that same element of bingeing.
But briefly, Theresa’s case has been diagnosed as one of acute hallucinatory psychosis, brought on by a particularly difficult and prolonged adolescent psychosexual adjustment, no doubt aggravated by...
I remember, when I was a little kid, I was good at sports, and I could jump off the high board. And then puberty hit, and suddenly I was looking to boys for direction. I remember that as a great loss.
It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizo...
I liked my students, who were often so eager, bright, and enthusiastic that it took me years to notice how much trouble they had in reading a fairly simple short story. Almost simultaneously, I was st...
How ashamed most of us would be, if we were reminded of some past behavior, some attitude that we maintained while under the delusion that we were in love—and were loved in return.
Don’t come to Paris if you’re planning a solitary hike through a sexual desert.
I’ve always found that the better the book I’m reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might, someday, become smarter.
The truth is that grammar is always interesting, always useful. Mastering the logic of grammar contributes, in a mysterious way that again evokes some process of osmosis, to the logic of thought.
You think, Fuck it. The guy’s a genius. He deserves her. What is a woman, after all? You are alive and in Paris.
Maybe real love is being able to ask, Do I have greens in my teeth?
Literature not only breaks the rules, but makes us realize that there are none.
I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and what I could be, if…there weren...
Her mother had responded in kind, and the result was unpleasantness and misery rebounding all the time.