I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.

No fiction is good fiction unless it is true to life, and yet no life is worth relating unless it be a life out of the ordinary; and then it seems improbable like fiction.

We need to talk,” he insisted, opening the door to his jeep that was parked next to my car. I was still holding out hope this would end and I would see his smile soon....

Charlee has my arm. She has my arm—my arm that’s rigid from pleasure, from her touch—in her little fingers. She holds my other one, too and she’s right there, that sweet candy perfume stripping the...

I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only...

While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or...

Her kiss could kill us, and my consent signed our death certificates, selfishly and without control. (Eric)

I touched his face. “Look,” I said. “I love you more than everything else in the world combined. Isn’t that enough?” “Yes, it is enough,” he answered, smiling. “Enough for forever.

As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story...

What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer’s fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the world’s eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and...

The strength of fiction is not in reading about yourself, but in reading about other people.

Maybe I’ll work for a label someday, write some fiction, nonfiction. Someday I’d like to go back to school and get my teaching degree. I want to be a grandpa. I want to have more...

Perhaps it was that I wanted to see what I had learned, what I had read, what I had imagined, that I would never be able to see the city of London without seeing it...

Like the ‘good’ characters in literature, the sane don’t have any memorable lines.

Why did you leave? Am I not good enough? Where did you go? When did it happen? ..Who are you?

He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.

Idolatry happens when you worship or praise anything excessively to the point of causing you to believe it reigns supreme. All things on this earth are temporal, even your very own desires. Be careful that...

Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room.” The Guardian. 10 September 2010.]

Hurricanes couldn’t remove you from my mind. You’re my world and I’m incapable of not loving you.

Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.

The monkey liked most humans. They left food cans outside their homes for his family to rummage through in the morningsun. Some yelled and threw sticks, but were slow and didn’t bite. Humans were mostly...

There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on–a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion.

When you touch a man’s body, he will enjoy the moment, when you touch a man’s heart he will remember it forever.

C, it was like my breath was stolen. My heart seemed to merge with yours. When you came into my life, all I wanted was you. All I thought about was you. Your smile, your...

I mutter and mutter and no one to listen. I speak my words in Japanese and my daughter will not hear them. The words that come from our ears, our mouths, they collide in the...

The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.

There is no right or wrong, only what we believe is more right or more wrong

The Doctrine is the Ecstasy

I mostly believe, deep in my bones, that life is very simply beyond description; regardless of what one makes of it, life always spills over the parameters of how anyone has chosen to define it.

If you want the extra-ordinary, you’ve got to be willing to forsake the ordinary’ – Annie Grimes in Mr Alhourani’s Dead Man’s Spots

If anyone or anything tries to curse or kill the Goodness at the Center of all things, it will just keep coming back to life. Forever Easter.

Jesus of Nazareth could have chosen simply to express Himself in moral precepts; but like a great poet He chose the form of the parable, wonderful short stories that entertained and clothed the moral precept...

Everything was quiet now. It was even too freaky quiet. The house seemed big without anyone else inside. It felt lonely; like a ghost town.

Since truth is often stranger than fiction, fiction needs to be pretty weird.

Everyone asks me how I got started into writing. I wish I had some cool story to tell, but the truth is pretty lame. My wife and I were having a drink on our back...

I should like to write about what happens when fictive people encounter and are embellished by real people.

The marks we leave are too often scars.

Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world “postmodernist.

Beneath Albright’s office, the colliery sprawled across the hillside, red brick buildings scattered as though hurled from a great height, a hotchpotch of mismatched structures spattered on the valley floor. At the bottom stood the...

But Mother, I don’t want to go. It’s just that…I have to. I can’t spend the rest of my life hiding in the attic.[…]I don’t want to be a burden[…]I want to do something with...

We all fight for money, some for power, but most of all for love. But me, I fight to become a champion.

Bill is a fiction writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound.

Perhaps she moves too slowly now, or the world moves too fast for her. She enters the lift, a giant wheel turns and steel cables lower the mechanized box. The lift drops down a black...

No one person is the cause for or consequence of all that happens. I am just the tenth man, the threshold, the turn in the tide. I stand here on the shoulders of humanity, a...

Lucy: I don’t feel like talking about college. It increases my stress level.James: And increased stress levels lead to hair loss.Lucy: My head-hair volume is fine.James: You say that like I should be concerned about...

Most fan fiction is terrible.

What we seek is the key to the universe. You didn’t expect it to be easy, did you?

Y cuando todas las ratas estuvieron dentro de al caja, Hamelín apagó el televisor

Presently a soprano voice of richness and depth floated from the open windows of the parlor, resonating over the darkening greenery. All at once it was as if the entire scene before them was awakened...

I stare at him. “You can’t risk not winning. Not because of me.” Sean doesn’t lift his eyes from the counter. “We make our move when you make yours. You on the inside, me on...