事
We are all given one thing by which our lives are measured, one determination.
The stories we tell shape the selves we become.
The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.
He said that the way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.
The truth about the world is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is. A hat trick in a medicine show. A fevered dream. A trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent. An itinerant carnival. A migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.
The best stories are the ones that leave you with more questions than answers.
The people in my stories are not heroes or villains. They are just people trying to get through life.
We don't ever let go of anything, we just go on to the next thing.
It's not the writer's job to tell you how to feel. It's the writer's job to tell you something and make you feel it.
Writing is the only thing I've ever done with persistence, except for being married.
The best thing about being a writer is that you get to live in the world you create.
The trick is to pay attention to what's happening around you and to keep writing.
The fundamental fact about all of us is that we're alive for a while but will die before long.
The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.
I want the reader to feel something is astonishing—not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens.
We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.
People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken.
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.