Leave a mark on the world. Instead, the world has left marks on us. We got older. Life chastened us so that now we lie waiting to die, or walk on canes, or sit on porches where once the young juices f...
I honestly believe that the counsel I gave Curt was mainly sound, and I don't think too much of it was holier-than-thou. I tried to give him a code to live by. He wanted not one scrap of it, he didn't...
Hard writing makes easy reading.
There is no way to step off the tread mill. It is all treadmill.
Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an in...
Perceptions trained in another climate and another landscape have had to be modified. That means we have had to learn to quit depending on perceptual habit. Our first and hardest adaptation was to lea...
Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
We’re all tougher than we think we are. We’re fixed so that almost anything heals.
We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.
There are further considerations I might raise. How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? What are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is...
The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, o...
No place is a place until it has found its poet.
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
It is not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.
I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
I have heard of people's lives being changed by a dramatic or traumatic event--a death, a divorce, a winning lottery ticket, a failed exam. I never heard of anybody's life but ours being changed by a...
His mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes.
A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people.