Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm always hungry for people.
Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.
Sex is a good starting point for everything.
My childhood was as conventional as you could get.
I'm kind of a control freak. But there are others like me.
Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.
As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.
In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.
A lot of books about marriage are about marriages falling apart.
I'm a physical learner. I learn from writing drafts, not reading them.
We need the skeletons of other stories to understand our own, sometimes.
At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.
Marriage seems to be predicated on protecting a very deep and intimate form of mystery.
When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.
Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur; we choose to love; we do not choose to cease loving.
In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.
I try not to think too much or be too impatient, and let the back of my brain do its mysterious work.
The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.
Total intimacy is a myth; that said, a particular kind of loneliness can be both beautiful and fruitful.
Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.
I'm a writer, not an actor. I want to write rather than perform. I'm looking forward to disappearing for a while.
As soon as you publish a book and the reader reads it, they're making an extension of your brain with their brain.
Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.
We're all functions of our societies, right? And we all become who we are because of the invisible forces that mold us.
I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.
I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.
I've never wanted to chuck my mortgage, drop the kids off at their grandparents' and run gloriously naked in fields of flax.
Our human impulse is to control everything, but fiction seems to me to be about allowing an element of mystery into the text.
If there's a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.
I'm a private person, a shy person. Sometimes, reading for eleven hours straight feels to me like the perfect way to spend a day.
I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism, and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms.
I see ghosts everywhere, and that is partially a function of my being incredibly near-sighted and reading way too late into the night.
Writing by hand is a way of letting mystery into my writing. But I'm constantly trying to figure out how to do this job. It's a work in progress.
Even the presence of my kids cannot, during those writing hours, disturb me. Unless there's a bone sticking out of their arm, I'm not interested.
But I've married a deeply sensible person who is extremely good at talking me down from my various ledges, and who takes care of me in a billion ways.
Sometimes immense things, like war and death and aging, are best seen from the corner of the eye and written of only obliquely, with tremendous lightness.
We think of stories a lot of the time as being horizontal texts, beginning to end. But I love the idea of having little vertical spikes in the story, too.
It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you'd find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual.
I love Twitter. It's like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you're tired of them.
I want to be identified as a writer, not a Southern writer, not a woman writer, not a woman from this or that place, but unfortunately it doesn't always happen.
You had to pick up a landline to make sure your best friend wore a matching outfit to school. I do remember people talking more. Nostalgia is dangerous, though.
The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.
If you look at communal experiments in general for any amount of time, you'll find a lot of horrors: raped children, sexual slavery, eugenics experiments, on and on.
In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.
I feel as if I've been so inured to failure, because I fail more than I succeed. As with any kind of fiction, I throw out so many pages; I get rejected so many times.
I won't walk under scaffolding or under ladders. I wear things like a baseball player wears things that are supposed to have luck. I am superstitious about everything.
Bigger stories are made out of longer acquaintance with fact and character, but I also love the tiny stories in which almost everything has to be inferred and imagined.
It's wonderful that nothing you write is ever going to be as beautiful as what's in your head, because that gap is where the art can enter and begin to stretch its limbs.
I seem to long for community and mistrust it in equal measure, and so I spend most of my days carefully constructing various communities in stories and seeing if they fly.
While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.