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?
We don't know what we'd do. Nobody knows what accident of fate or DNA or character will determine how we act when the shit hits the fan.
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.
Staying awake seemed like a gift until, as so often happens with gifts, it became a burden.
I was only pretending to be the underpaid, duplicitous, ineffective, struggling teacher of immigrant French. The real Suzanne was the lover and muse of a brilliant artist.
I discovered how reading a book can make you want to write one.
Consequently, we sympathize. We identify. We care. In fact, most writers would like you to identify
But did I ever get over her? She came to symbolize everything I wanted and would never have.
Is starting to happen between the two teenagers: It gave me a queer feeling each time I looked into his deep blue eyes, and he sat there with that mysterious laugh playing round his lips…and with my w...
Illness of Bep’s father—bad news that makes her want to fall asleep as a release from thinking.
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...
Reading can show you how capacious and stretchy fiction is, how much it can accommodate, and how far it has expanded beyond the straight and narrow path from point A to point B.
Nabokov, Heinrich von Kleist, Raymond Carver, Jane Bowles, James Baldwin, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant—the list goes on and on. They are the teachers to whom I go, the authorities I consult, the models...
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...
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...
I heard he went home to Poughkeepsie and moved back in with his mom.
Every so often I'll hear writers say that there are other writers they would read if for no other reason than to marvel at the skill with which they can put together the sort of sentences that move us...
Because the diary was not written in retrospect, it contains the trembling life of every moment.
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...