Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Call me the author.
Information is control.
We all have the same dreams.
Writers are only rarely likable.
I lead a very conventional life.
Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
We write to discover what we think.
California: The west coast of Iowa.
We are the stories we tell ourselves
Anything worth having has its price.
Time is the school in which we learn.
Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
any compulsion tries to justify itself.
Writers are always selling somebody out.
We all survive more than we think we can.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Mourning has its place but also its limits.
I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
When the ground starts moving, all bets are off.
I don't know what I think until I write it down.
Memories are what you no longer want to remember.
I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.
I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.
You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.
Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
I think nobody owns the land until their dead are in it.
The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.
You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.
Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
I don't write for catharsis; I have to write to understand.
If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be
I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.
I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.
He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.
What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.