She made love with the freshness of an impatient virgin and the ingenuity of a sex-scarred whore.
Novels are written—as life is lived—One Day At A Time.
I try to avoid eating endangered species, let alone mythical ones. You
Hopper was neither an illustrator nor a narrative painter. His paintings don’t tell stories. What they do is suggest—powerfully, irresistibly—that there are stories within them, waiting to be told. He...
Come on in, Elaine said. She’s already here. Pam, this is Mr. Scudder, Matthew Scudder. Matt, I’d like you to meet Pam.
Around one-thirty it started raining lightly. Almost immediately the umbrella sellers turned up on the streetcorners. You'd have thought they had existed previously in spore form, springing miraculous...
—And I won't deny your neighbors will take you more seriously if you tell them you've written a novel. (Of course if that's the main concern, just go and tell them. You don't have to write anything. J...
When the window turned dark, it was presumably night; when it grew blue again, I guessed that morning had come.
Well, you live and you learn, and generally in that order. I
The moving finger writes, and having writ Moves on. Nor all your piety and wit Can call it back to cancel half a line Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
Some are errors. There’s Malta 20a, for example, the 2-1/2p dull blue; it’s supposed to be surcharged One Penny, but this variety has it One Pnney. It’s affordable, and visually remarkable, and I pick...
Life, I'd heard someone say, is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. It seemed to me that it was both at once, even for those of us who don't do much of either.
Keller sat in his hotel room with his purchases on the desk in front of him, pleased with what he’d acquired and the bargain prices he’d paid, but a little bit anxious at having spent so much money. H...
If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.
If you are lying, you have built your lie on true foundations.
Everybody has mean little places inside himself.
Earlier you made her sound like a victim. Now she sounds like a villain. Everybody’s both.
Booze and tobacco and lots of sex. It keeps a lad young.
As my grandmother used to say, if you've got nothing good to say about someone, let's hear it.
And was there anything on earth as dangerous as getting everything you ever wanted? As