The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
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.
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.
Both reading and writing are experiences–lifelong– in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.
For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.
I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.
Surely even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the touch of one another, or all is lost.
I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
Learning stamps you with it’s moments. Childhood’s learning is made up of moments. It isn’t steady. It’s a pulse.
She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.
There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.
Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams.
A whole tree of lightning stood in the sky. She kept looking out the window, suffused with the warmth from the fire and with the pity and beauty and power of her death. The thunder rolled.
It was late afternoon. This time tomorrow he would be somewhere on a good graveled road, driving his car past things that happened to people, quicker than their happening.(“Death of a Traveling Salesman”)
The thing that seemed like silence must have been the endless cry of all the crickets and locusts in the world, rising and falling.(“The Wide Net”)
Don’t want to do a thing, Ran, do we, from now and on till evermore.
People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel…but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make.
I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.
Henry James said there isn’t any difference between “the English novel” and “the American novel” since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.
Children like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way all over again.
Children like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way all over again.
The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
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.
I can’t think I had much of a sense of humor as long as I remained the only child. When my brother Edward came along we both became comics, making each other laugh.
Through travel I first became aware of the outside world it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.