So little, once it has changed, changes back.

She was never without dark glasses, she was always well groomed, there was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself,...

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the...

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Oh, I adore to cook. It makes me feel so mindless in a worthwhile way.

Her bedroom window overlooked the garden, and now and then, usually when she was “having a bad spell,” Mr. Helm had seen her stand long hours gazing into the garden, as though what she saw...

Before publication, and if provided by persons whose judgment you trust, yes, of course criticism helps. But after something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise.

Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper,...

You can’t give your heart to a wild thing.

It’s a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.

She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox.

Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc — it’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.

Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.

I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn’t being pious. Just practical. Cancer may cool you, but the other’s sure to.

Sorrow and profound fatigue are at the heart of Dewey’s silence. It had been his ambition to learn “exactly what happened in that house that night.” Twice now he’d been told, and the two versions...

That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.

Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.