Sometimes I still feel that there are two of me: one clean, flawless picture, the other imperfect and cracked; one boy, one girl; one voice that speaks aloud and one that whispers in my ear;...

Despite what you think you know, most people don’t want to fight, especially when evenly matched. … That’s why you see those pissed young men doing the dance of “don’t hold me back” while desperately...

Iranian fiction has entered a new era…The Islamic Revolution has shaken all values and norms within society. Now, the images of women have to be rethought and redefined. Under extreme pressure, women must look at...

Misunderstandings arise only in undefined relationships

It’s not an easy thing to tell a true story.

The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom.

I’m going to leave your ass out here in the dark with no way to get home. And one of your legs is missing.

No girl can forget the day she lost her virginity, or the circumstance that led to it

If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and...

Tell me a story,’ demanded Fireflyer.’Why? Do you eat them, too, then?”Only the ohs and ayes and ees and oos. The Kays are too spikey and the zeds are too buzzzy and the ones with...

He thought, that all men, trickled away, changing constantly, until they finally dissolved, while the artist-created images remained unchangeably the same. He thought that the fear of death was perhaps the root of all art,...

While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always...

In the forest you may find yourself lost, without companions. You may come to a river which is not on a map. You may lose sight of your quarry, and forget why you are there....

Love, it is said, is blind, but love is not blind. It is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard. To see the best is to see most clearly, and...

No, it’s not fair, but what makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven. Earth is earth. Dead is dead. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough. It won’t...

[Referring to passage by Alice Munro] Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers — namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say,...

Gordon Edgley’s sudden death came as a shock to everyone – not least himself. One moment he was in his study, seven words into the twenty-fifth sentence of the final chapter of his new book,...

NOTHING IS GREATER THAN ITS SOURCE

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

It never occurs to one to think whether she is pretty or ugly. One just surrenders to her charm.

While I stood on the front porch, watching him climb into his vehicle, I breathed in the humid air. I looked at the cloudless sky, and the blue vastness of it made me think about...

I knew that it was impossible for us to be kept apart for too long.

He felt as though the bones of his ribcage were snapping beneath the weight of the stone that God had laid over his heart.

It was the sunlight coming through the window that woke Alex up; mother nature’s own alarm clock rudely snapped him back to consciousness. The white light poured in so arrogantly that it was too much...

I don’t read other science fiction. I don’t read any at all.

Be who you were meant to be and not what you’ve allowed yourself to become,” Kate said to Mavis as she wavered over following her dream. from ‘Lifesong

That was when I saw their hate come out. They fought on the front lawn. Balloons and my birthday cake stood witness as I watched every regretful blow from my mother. I knew my sister...

He who writes books that aim to convince is a comedian, too, just a comedian. What has he got to offer others, apart from chains, still more chains? Fiction never liberated anyone. No one ever...

The first thing you lose when you die is your motor skills.

It gets kind of zen after awhile, life is a journey, time is a river, the door is ajar.

Schopenhauer wrote that to desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake. He was correct.

My heart started racing, not the bad kind of heart racing, like I’m going to die. But the good kind of heart racing, like, Hello, can I help you with something? If not, please step...

But Pierre had been born with a shrewdness that made him early aware that a failure to believe that human events were ordered by a higher power was regarded by many in the highest positions...

Remember Whose You Are.

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...

The woman turns away; one wing blackens like an onyx gem while the other glows white like a bright spotlight. She flies into the sky, leaving the crowd staring in astonishment. Angels fly away in...

I felt a lot better; not being alone in being alone.

That the stars guide us, but do not compel us. It is our free will that determines the outcome of all things. God does impose his will on us, rather he makes it known and...

In real life I do violence, but for psychic stuff I do other things better.

We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.

I don’t judge or believe in any religion, I’m just learning from their divine esoteric stories.

I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious...

We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn’t, why would there be so many of them? There’s something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell’s...

As girls, we will do anything for the person whom we love. We will scale buildings in the rain or run through fire if it means saving our love’s life. There is absolutely nothing more...

The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with,...

In French culture, the best way of buying time or getting off the hook entirely in a thorny personal situation is to claim that it’s complicated. The French did not invent love, but they did...

But a slow, deeply satisfied smile came over him, and his breath quickened. ‘So softly it starts,’ he whispered. ‘Foolishly clever and with an unsurvivable trust. It just saved your miserable life, that questionable show...

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

That thought probably has occurred to Socrates too.

The sight of her made him understand why he’d lost his faith in God.