Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of...

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.

Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another’s work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our...

A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.

When they turned off, it was still early in the pink and green fields. The fumes of morning, sweet and bitter, sprang up where they walked. The insects ticked softly, their strength in reserve; butterflies...

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...

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...

He loved happiness like I love tea.

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 fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.

He was surprised at the way she answered. She had taken a long time to say that. She had nodded her head in a deep way too. Had she wished to affect him with some...

There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.

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.

He did not like illness, he distrusted it, as he distrusted the road without signposts.(“Death Of A Traveling Salesman”)

She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.

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”)

Ashamed, shrugging a little, and then shivering, he took his bags and went out. The cold of the air seemed to lift him bodily. The moon was in the sky.On the slope he began to...

I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.

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”)

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.

I’m a great reader that never has time to read.

And it was so still. The silence of the fields seemed to enter and move familiarly through the house. The wind used the open hall. He felt that he was in a mysterious, quiet, cool...

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

But he wanted to leap up, to say to her, I have been sick and I found out then, only then, how lonely I am. Is it too late? My heart puts up a struggle...

Human life is fiction’s only theme.

We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of our own people, all...

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...

I am a writer who came froma sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what...

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know...

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the...

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.

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.