Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was always my own teacher.
Beware of a man with manners.
Suppose you meet me in the woods.
Human life is fiction's only theme.
We are the breakers of our own hearts
All serious daring starts from within.
Plots are ... what the writer sees with.
Making reality real is art's responsibility.
Out of love you can speak with straight fury.
Never think you've seen the last of anything.
No art ever came out of not risking your neck.
I'm a great reader that never has time to read.
Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.
A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
What we know about writing the novel is the novel.
The first act of insight is throw away the labels.
Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.
Write about what you don't know about what you know.
Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.
If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.
One place understood helps us understand all places better
The very greatest mystery is in unsheathed reality itself.
All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.
The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever lost.
The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.
Location pertains to feelings - feelings are bound up in place.
Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.
One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.
A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.
There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.
The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.
She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.
Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.
Time is anonymous; when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over.
Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?
To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.
I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.
Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.
A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.
it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.
A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told -- returned to the world it came out of.
I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken-and to know a truth.
The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.