There are some people who remain your best friends even if you haven’t seen them for ages, and others with whom you start from scratch every time.
Stories aren’t about things. Stories are things. Stories aren’t about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions.
So perhaps the correct conclusion is that Green was less attuned to how people when they speak - the actual words and expressions they employ - than to what they . This notion of dialogue as a pure e...
People see everything through the lens of their obsessions.
Minutes after the shootings, everybody’s cell phone rang.
Margot used to like describing men as 'my unhappy love affair.' But hadn't that presumed the existence of a happy love affair that made the others unimportant? What is unhappy is the only kind Margo e...
But did I ever get over her? She came to symbolize everything I wanted and would never have.
Anne tells him that his silence is, in a way, like her chatter.
AMONG THE DEMONS that taunt a writer before he can open a vein and write in his own blood are the devils that whisper: Are you brave enough to tell the truth?
Illness of Bep’s father—bad news that makes her want to fall asleep as a release from thinking.
Convinced us that she is telling the truth as she describes the world around her and looks inward, as if her private self is a foreign country whose geography and customs she is struggling to understa...
The Nazis understood how useful it was to prevent the camp guards from identifying with the prisoners, to emphasize the otherness, the difference of the people whom the boxcars brought to Sobibor and...
Staying awake seemed like a gift until, as so often happens with gifts, it became a burden.
In part what made the club such a haven was its power to make each person feel temporarily less alone.
In any case, it is neither the responsibility nor the purpose of art to make us better human beings. And it’s no wonder that art that takes on this solemn task so often winds up being didactic, preach...
Consequently, we sympathize. We identify. We care. In fact, most writers would like you to identify
Because the diary was not written in retrospect, it contains the trembling life of every moment.
Two: Distract yourself. Paris has something for everyone. Let’s imagine you are feeling slightly disenchanted with women. Dozens of places will persuade you that a beautiful woman is nothing more than...
To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent...
The very same government that, by raising taxes, permitting uncontrolled immigration, weakening the military, failing to control the national debt, and fostering skyrocketing unemployment, was making...