And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved ...

And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

I am too nervous to eat pie.

Don’t complain, don’t explain.

She won't give him back his look.

Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.

My life is going to change. I feel it.

What do any of us really know about love?

Writers will be judged by what they write.

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it

Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

I guess my writing has changed as my life has.

There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.

I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.

I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.

What good are insights? They only make things worse.

You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

and did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did.

Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.

You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?

The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

The fiction I'm most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.

Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.

A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.

I've done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never less than 10 or 12 drafts.

There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?

In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.

This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.

Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.

There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.

Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.

Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.

It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.

In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldnt turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.

In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldn't turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

I think marriage is one of those things that writers draw on, one of those emotional reservoirs that go way back.

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