Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?
And I would not blame you if you still asked, Why bother to make contact with kindred spirits you never see and may never hear from, who perhaps do not even exist except in your hopes? Why spend ten y...
You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and ever...
Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything - though it might have been a good thing if he'd also taught her to question the act of questioning.
So what happened when base desires and unworthy passions troubled the flesh of men and women inhibited from casual promiscuity, adultery, and divorce that keep us so healthy?
Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don’t warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn’t differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to ou...
Ruth believes that boys are not found around stables because what they like is taking things apart and putting them together again, and for this purpose horses are not so satisfactory as cars, motorcy...
It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.
It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.
I'm tired of hearing that the Lord shapes the back to the burden.
I don’t care how they speculate, or what their answers are. We live as we can, we do what we must, and not everything goes by either Freudian or Victorian patterns. What I am sure of is that friendshi...
I can't see that Danish episode as an adventure, or a crisis survived, or a serious quest for anything definable. It was just another happening like today's luncheon, something I got into and got out...
Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t aff...
When you marry into a Mormon family you marry tribes and nations.
To belong to a clan, to a tight group of people allied by blood and loyalties and the mutual ownership of closeted skeletons. To see the family vices and virtues in a dozen avatars instead of in two o...
The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come.
She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones.
If I had kept a journal, I could go back through it and check up on what memory reports plausibly but not necessarily truly. But keeping a journal then would have been like making notes while going ov...
Homesickness is a great teacher. It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from the arid lands, and like where I came from. I was used to dry clarity and sharpness in the air. I was used...
His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn't yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid.