Ain't no one ever told you yet? I recon I thought you've all figured out.- What? - That all this stuff about happy-endings is lies. The only ending in this world is death.
I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.
The growth of the imagination demands windows-windows through which we can look out at the world and windows through which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just this way.
All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then...
Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.
The Municipal Councils in these areas excluded Chinese members, and the police and civil servants were foreigners. Even the names of the streets reflected foreign imperialism—such as Jessfield Road, o...
I have been mocked by beauty, too. But it was the beauty which cost me nothing that in the end turned upon me.
Watched in horror until Walter Cronkite finally announced the news that Kennedy was dead. The boys didn’t try to argue about the stupidity of the ancient Hebrews again.
You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like.
Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.
I was not happy in any way that would make sense to most people, but I was, for the first time in my life, deeply content with what life was giving me. Part
How could he explain it in a way Leslie would understand, how he yearned to reach out and capture the quivering life about him and how when he tried, it slipped past his fingertips, leaving a dry foss...
Church always seemed the same. Jess could tune it out the same way he tuned out school, with his body standing up and sitting down in unison with the rest of the congregation but his mind numb and flo...
...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were...
You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.
There are no guarantees of success, much less of quality. If you don’t dare to be a mediocre writer, you’ll never be a writer at all.
She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it too late to go back, she had left him stranded there - like an astr...
One of the novels that was hardest for me to write had to deal with the horrible slaughter of war. I almost didn’t finish Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom for just that reason.
Many people are angry when they make a mistake, but very few people have the sense to be sorry.
Just close your eyes and keep your mind wide open.