Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance.
When I am near the end of a book, I have to sleep in the same room with it.
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.
Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.
There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.
Hand that on parting squeezes your shoulder, salutes the small of your back.
The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities.
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.
The last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up.
There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible
I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.
My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.
Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.
I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.
The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.
Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.
It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right.
That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.
To believe in'the greater good' isto operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
To believe in 'the greater good' is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.
It's just a deep pleasure to read something you've written yourself - if and when you like it.
I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
The truth is, it's easier for me to write than talk... to express the state I'm in at any time.
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.
It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.