My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.
A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.
The first act of insight is throw away the labels.
it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.
One place understood helps us understand all places better
People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.
The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.
The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.
A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
We are the breakers of our own hearts
Write about what you don't know about what you know.
Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.
Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?
Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.
There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.
No art ever came out of not risking your neck.
A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
Human life is fiction's only theme.
The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever lost.
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.
One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.
Integrity can be neither lost nor concealed nor faked nor quenched nor artificially come by nor outlived, nor, I believe, in the long run, denied.
If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
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