不是
"Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is, and you must bend to its power or live a lie."
"A story is not a message with a plot wrapped around it, but a plot that may contain a message."
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.
Literature isn't a moral beauty contest.
The past is always changing. It is not fixed. The past is not stable.
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
The soul is not a thing you can have. It is a way of being in the world.
Writing is not about being clever. It's about being honest.
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.
I don't write to explain. I write to explore.
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.
The real struggle is not between good and evil but between pain and pleasure.
Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.
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.
"Writing is a matter of patience and stubbornness, not talent."