He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.

Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.

I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one’s own pleasure, that fear may be mild — timidity is the word I’ve used here. If, however,...

Do you see this heart-stopping beauty? Look closely, because in a moment your heart will stop.

…She helped me find my heart when I thought my heart was gone.

The fundamental difference between the sexes is this: men make assumptions, but women rarely do.

But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.

I believe in evil, but all my life I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not there’s an outside evil, whether or not there’s a force in the world that really wants to destroy...

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years–if it ever did end–began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter...

He lay back, put his arm over his eyes, and tried to hold onto the anger, because the anger made him feel brave. A brave man could think. A coward couldn’t.

Tyler rolls out of bed, sniffs the armpits of yesterday’s T-shirt, tosses it aside, gets another out of the drawer. His dad sometimes asks him why he sets his alarm so early — it’s summer...

Sometimes home is where the heart is, Eddie thought randomly. I believe that. Old Bobby Frost said home’s the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Unfortunately, it’s...

Most people are sheep and sheep don’t eat meat

She was crazy but he needed her. Oh I am in so much trouble he thought, and stared blindly up at the ceiling as the droplets of sweat began to gather on his forehead again.

When you spend your life taking care of mudmen, you can’t help getting a little dirty yourself.

The universe (he said) offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain — although it may think it can — the finite...

Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.

It didn´t occur to me until later that there´s another truth, very simple: greed in a good cause is still greed.

Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?

I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.

A successful marriage was a balancing act-that was a thing everyone knew. A successful marriage was also dependent on a high tolerance for irritation.

Christ.No, not Christ. These leavings were made in propitiation of a much older God than the Christian one. People have called Him different things at different times, but Rachel’s sister gave Him a perfectly good...

The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.

Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.

Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them...

I don’t want to think too much about art, you see. I don’t want to attend symposia, listen to papers, or discuss it at cocktail parties … What I want to do is clutch my...

You know, small children take it as a matter of course that things will change every day and grown-ups understand that things change sooner or later and their job is to keep them from changing...

Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.

A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I’ll take A Midsummer Night’s Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a...

By the time he was done with the deer it had been dark three hours and his bad leg was singing ‘Ave Maria’.

Lover,” she whispers, and closes her eyes.It falls upon her.Love is like dying.

Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.

He didn’t know if that was really true or not, but he discovered something which was tremendously liberating: he didn’t care. He was very tired of thinking and thinking and still not knowing. He was...

…it was amazing, wasn’t it, how bad you could hurt when there was nothing physically wrong.

I looked at what he built, and to me it explained the stars.

My friend wants to get moving and so do I,’ Eddie said. ‘We’ve got miles to go yet.’I know that. It’s on your face, son. Like a scar.’Eddie was fascinated by the idea of duty...

Un hombre valiente podía pensar. Un cobarde, no.

Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?”He stared at me, baffled. “Why the fuck would you do that?

He began to cry, not hysterically or screaming as people cry when concealed rage with tears, but with continuous sobs who has just discovered that he’s alone and will be for long. He cried because...

Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think,...

This is how we bring about our own damnation, you know-by ignoring the voice that begs us to stop. To stop while there’s still time.

You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you.

We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other … except through faith.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses.

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

I tend to scare myself.