I still believe in the resilience of the human heart and the essential validity of love;I still believe that connections between people can be made and that the spirits which inhabit us sometimes touc...
I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale...
I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.
I had worked for a newspaper of sorts, word got around, and I became editor of our local school newspaper, The Drum. I don't recall being given any choice in this matter; I think I was simply appointe...
I can't understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there's already so much pain in the world.
Her body was wrapped in shadows like moth wings, like rose-petals.
Forty seemed about right, and it occurred to me that it's too bad for a fella to die at forty, a real shame. It's a man's most anonymous age.
Fools are the only folk on the earth who can absolutely count on getting what they deserve.
Come to a book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it, and draw your own map.... A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it.
By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.
But hardly anybody ever finds out that their actions really, actually, hurt other people! People don’t get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don’t stop pulling the wings off flie...
At the time we’re stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It’s not until the second or third class reunio...
Another part of getting older: you forgot what you wanted to remember, and remembered what you wanted to forget.
All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one...
All I can say is what you already know: some days are treasure. Not many, but I think in almost every life there are a few. That was one of mine, and when I'm blue -- when life comes down on me and ev...
A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.
A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again.
A friend came to visit James Joyce one day and found the great man sprawled across his writing desk in a posture of utter despair.James, what’s wrong?' the friend asked. 'Is it the work?'Joyce indicat...
He sketches a world of Darwinian struggle where all the savages wear three-piece suits.
You needn't die happy when your time comes, but you must die satisfied, for you have lived your life from the beginning to the end and ka is always served.