If living is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.
Surprised. Then everyone, by unspoken
Who you are shapes how you are loved.
Laura's gossip was redeemed by its lack of spite. She was warmly objective about every event, taking endless delight in action and complexity, as if she had been bed-ridden in a small windowless room...
In her minds eye she sat there, in the domesticated golden sunlight on the velvet sofa, lapped around by carpets and books and mahogany, solitary and content, as if, in fact, cloistered.
Everyone starved. Starvation is a potent weapon, and the Bolsheviks are happy to wield it. The cheapest way to get rid of the opposition is to starve them. Lenin did it the expensive way, shooting the...
In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.
Not to borrow trouble by worrying about it.
So it was with Vigdis’ neighbors. Folk recalled how fat she was, how proud, though only the daughter of a cowman, and how niggardly. Serving boys had been beaten for taking a bit of honey, and neighbo...
Rosie and Mary had taken only a 10 percentage of this privilege - they were three minutes late leaving their room and took the second bus that went past rather than the first just so they could feel t...
My mind is like a room where the door swings free in the breeze, and many visitors come and go and stay and vanish as they will.
If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.
Respect and fear are two different things.
I was an only child. I've known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.
Said, looking for a job on Broadway.
The novel integrates several forms of human intelligence - verbal intelligence (for the style), psychological intelligence (for the characters), logical intelligence (for the plot), spatial intelligen...
She chewed the tender meat and sucked out the juices and felt the sauce coat her tongue and roll down her throat. After that, he looked still better. Another
It didn't occur to us. We had swum in the ocean of religion all our lives and not gotten wet.
The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered m...
Somehow, knowing that Alzheimer's is coming mocks all one's aspirations - to tell stories, to think through certain issues as only a novel can do, to be recognised for one's accomplishments and hard w...