Thomas tilted his head towards me. “Don’t mind him, he’s drunk.””Does he work for you?” I asked him. “Who, Rick? No no no. Really though, he’s a fine gentleman, if you speak to him while...

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that’s the most important thing there is for middle-class people.

Truly, it is in loss that we learn a thing’s true value.

[M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the...

One doesn’t intentionally to alter the truth, just enhance it and make it more memorable.

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Thainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was...

There is no fact which is not at least part fiction.

Look how we have made our broken hearts soar.

There was a dull pang of regret because it was not the kiss of love which had inflamed her, because it was not love which had held this cup of life to her lips.

Friendship isn’t always sunnyside up.

A fear of the unknown: what was that called?Worse yet: a fear of the known.

A part of me sought the light in all the people I knew, but with the Shadows, it was like bringing them back from a subterfuge comma. Literally tearing the veil of blackness down and...

Then the sun came up and shook the night chill out of the air the way you’d shake a rug.

The pure perfect truth of life is that we are here to create heaven on earth, to bring the perfection of what is above down to us, and in doing so to become transformed as...

Aging and the prospect of dying by no means enhance the attractiveness of fictitious comforts to come in paradise, or the veracity of malicious myths about hellfire and damnation. Fear and feeblemindedness cannot be credibly...

Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories.

We need more love, to supersede hatred, —We need more strength, to resist our weaknesses, —We need more inspiration, to lighten up our inner mind. —We need more learning, to erase our ignorance, —We need...

Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it–love yourself

You two are bound to one another. You always have been … and you can’t run away from what you are. No matter where you go, your feelings for her are going to follow you.

The only way that you can identify and then fulfill your life’s purpose is for you to love yourself, charge up your life and serve the world.

Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility.

My job takes up many daylight hours, it wakes me in the still of night and fills my head with ghosts and monsters but I love it, telling stories is what I was born to...

A witch, a vampire, and a pixy walk into a bar, I thought as I led the way into the Squirrel’s End. It was early, and the sun had yet to set when the door...

There’s always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won’t reflect the storyteller’s true beliefs, it...

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

The best fiction is true.

I recalled something I’d read a long time ago about Satan. When he appeared, it wouldn’t be as a demon but as an ordinary-looking guy with a convincing message of peace.

I gave you the best of me.

Rough palms cradled my face while my fingers gripped the pillow on either side of his. Lips, teeth, tongue, mingled together. I ate him up and didn’t let go until I had to come up...

Dear, he do have a problem.

We awoke to a fabulation of ice, the sun shining like a weapon, light rocketing off every surface except the surfaces of the Army’s clean streets and walks.

The line between fiction and fact is at times factual and at times fictional

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...