In marching, in mobs, in football games, and in war, outlines become vague; real things become unreal and a fog creeps over the mind. Tension and excitement, weariness, movement--all merge in one grea...
If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal a...
I've given you everything a friend can give, Joe Saul-even contempt, and that's the hardest thing of all.
I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.
I'm gonna try to learn. Gonna learn why folks walk in the grass, gonna hear 'em talk, gonna hear 'em sing. Gonna listen to kids eatin' mush. Gonna hear husban' an' wife a-poundin' the mattress in the...
I think I love you, Cal. -AbraI'm not good. -CalBecause you're not good. -Abra
I nearly always write just as I nearly always breathe.
I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention,help,and conversation is to be lost.A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear th...
I have no choice of living or dying, you see, sir, but I do have a choice of how I do it.
I guess she's just nuts,' he said. 'And if she's nuts, a guy's got to do nuts things. You don't think you could say the hell with her?
I could be held back just by being needed. Please try not to need me. That's the worst bait of all to a lonely man.
I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.
I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.
I always found in myself a dread of west and a love of east.
How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him--he has known a fear beyond every other.
How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?
His ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.
He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.
He had said, I am a man, and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and halfgod
He did not often think of people as individuals, but rather as antidotes for the poison of his loneliness, as escapes from the imprisoned ghosts.