I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don’t...

I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead-head-on, heedlessly one might say-or ‘fearlessly’- into my own future: this time of utter raw anguished loss. Though...

Like a turnip such a head could be blown away very easily. For where a man was weak, a woman has unmanned him. It would be a mercy to blow such a man away.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

I have no inner life. I have no ‘intimate’ life. I am just what I-what to do. I move from one habitation to another like one of those-is it herit crabs? Taking up residence in...

I never change, I simply become more myself.

Warum man schreibt, ist eine Frage die sich der Schriftsteller, völlig versunken in seine Arbeit, nicht stellt. Theorien sind das Gebiet derer, die nicht handeln.

My dis-interest in what people speak of as “women’s problems,” “women’s literature.” Have women a special sensibility? No. There are individuals uniquely talented & uniquely equipped to interpret the complex symbolism of the world but...

culture” – and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. ~ Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that...

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can’t see, whose beginning you’ve forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and...

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?

And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it’s inaudible.

Hating “The Great Gatsby” (the novel) is like spitting into the Grand Canyon. It will not be going away anytime soon, but you will be.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.

I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke...

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man’s body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to...

Only where there is life can there be home.

I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.

A fear of the unknown: what was that called?Worse yet: a fear of the known.

A wet autumn morning, a garbage truck clattering down the street. The first snowfall of the season, blossom sized flakes falling languidly and melting on teh ground, a premature snow fall delicate as lace, rapidly...

It isn’t the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.

Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don’t know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you’ve been told, what the...

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.

In love there are two things – bodies and words.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there’s a reason. There has to be

This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can’t escape. Life was easier then. You just didn’t pick up the phone.

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a “logical consistency,” or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.

Memory blurs, that’s the point. If memory didn’t blur you wouldn’t have the fool’s courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Just to pose certain questions is, I guess, to show your hope they can be answered.

Keeing busy” is the remedy for all the ills in America. It’s also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

Be daring, take on anything. Don’t labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

But he doesn’t love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love–the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn’t happen. No love. People meet,...

Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and there’s no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to “overcome” doubt.

I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many ‘culturally-mandated’ differences. In First World countries we’ve evolved beyond mere biology -it isn’t the fate of the...

FOXFIRE NEVER SAYS NEVER!By the time the kidnapped turquoise-and-chrome car overturns–turns and turns and turns!–in a snow-drifted field north of Tydeman’s Corners Legs Sadovsky will have driven eleven miles from Eddy’s Smoke Shop on Fairfax...

You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can’t exercise memory until you’ve removed yourself from memory’s source.

This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled...

Running! If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems...

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo – that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident...

Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they...

The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn’t want to put restraints on “robber barons”-he might become one one day!

When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to...

Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you’ve just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you

There are some secrets so toxic you can’t share. Especially if you love who it is you’d have to share with.