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...
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...
Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
You’ve got a resilient temperament, Mister Morgan, Sally said. I have to compensate for a woman who lives in constant anxiety, depression, and alarm.
You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? ‘Sure He’s a good teacher, but what’s He published?
You can’t be close to the mortality of friends without being brought to think of your own.
Where you find the greatest good, there you will also find greatest Evil, for Evil likes Paradise every bit as much as Good does. What makes the best environment for Clematis armandi makes a lovely ho...
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.
The sound of anything coming at you—a train, say, or the future —has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute th...
The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment...
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...
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
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 would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats...
By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens...
No place is a place until it has found its poet.
I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man