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.
Many people have a gift for language that flows when they are talking and dries up when they are confronted with the blank page,
I heard he went home to Poughkeepsie and moved back in with his mom.
I discovered how reading a book can make you want to write one.
All of us have observed how often our erotic attractions reflect a mysterious but consistent taste, almost as if we were ordering a favorite dish
It's worthnoting that books are among the few remaining forms of entertainment not sustained by, and meant to further, the interests of advertising. Television, newspapers, and magazines are busily
What’s strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great...
Teaching students to value literary masterpieces is our best hope of awakening them to the infinite capacities and complexities of human experience, of helping them acknowledge and accept complexity a...
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...
My publishers, two Catalan brothers with an inherited income, took me out to lunch to inform me that the first print run would be only five hundred copies. Five hundred readers? I accept! And the lunc...
Like the one-sentence paragraph, the second-person point of view can also make us suspect that style is being used as a substitute for content.
I have one outstanding trait in my character, which must strike anyone who knows me for any length of time, and that is my self-knowledge. I can watch myself and my actions, just like an outsider.
I dropped a word from the string of negative adjectives that had trailed behind me like tin cans behind the village idiot. Unappreciated, unloved, unmarried. But no longer unpublished.
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...
All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices.
Not all great writers may seem great to us, regardless of how often and how hard we try to see their virtues. I know, for example, that Trollope is considered to have been a brilliant novelist, but I’...
It is the rarest of qualities: to feel something—anything—for someone beside yourself. And in my experience it is rarer still to have empathy for people you don’t know.
I was trying to communicate—with nothing so obvious as a smile, but let’s say a smile of the eyes—my admiration for the chic of women in tuxedos escorting women in evening gowns.
Don’t order boeuf bourguignon if you’re a vegetarian, don’t venture into the tearooms if you don’t like ladies with lapdogs. Don’t come to Paris if you’re planning a solitary hike through a sexual des...
Something about the beauty of the library and how many books there were made me feel really eager to read, and I couldn't wait to get some free time so I could go back there and explore.