Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.

Living’s immediacy, you go full sail, you’re in a fever of motion. Until it’s safe and past and done and dead and you can say, like waking from a dream, “Yes I was happy then,...

There’s a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It’s a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the...

You people who have survived childhood don’t remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be...

I’m drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo...

And remember: you must not overwork your body, or your soul. You must not enslave yourself, as you would not enslave any other person. You must be the custodian of your self.

Boxing has become America’s tragic theater.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.

Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no ‘morality’. For what’s ‘morality’ but a leash around the neck? A noose? What’s ‘morality’ but what other people want you to...

What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children’s books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she’d been a little girl....

I’m sure all that you’ve heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

The distinction between “assistant” and intern” is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.But of course interns are paid, in experience.

The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to be fixed – neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall. A thermal haze of inexpressible sweetness, though bearing tiny bits of grit or mica,...

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.