The constant happiness is curiosity.
One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.
Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.
I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.
A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.
Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.
Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.
I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn't that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn't mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.
Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.
One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.
people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one
I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.
The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.
People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.
People are curious. A few people are. ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.
Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.
I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.
The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.
Hatred is always a sin, my mother told me. Remember that. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn’t waste the milk.
The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
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