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"When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it's being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn't have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing-maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world."
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"Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth."
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Personal Development
"In our Impulsive nature to write and repulsive nature to read that has led to a decline in literary genius in our times!"
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Personal Development
"..holding a book but reading the empty spaces."
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Personal Development
"Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood."
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Personal Development
"There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading."
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Personal Development
"The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction."
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Personal Development
"I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure. FaA«rie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold."
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Personal Development
"That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms."
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Personal Development
"Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score."
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Personal Development
"The test of a good critic is whether he knows when and how to believe on insufficient evidence."
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"I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language."
Inspirational
"Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there."
Truth
"All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children's games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot."
Death
"The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings."
Fulfillment
"How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process."
Creativity
"A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true."
Technology
"It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience...For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so many kinds of interaction between humans, and so many ways of creating patterns in the novel that can't be created in a short story, a play, a poem or a movie. The novel, simply, offers more opportunities for a reader to understand the world better, including the world of artistic creation. That sounds pretty grand, but I think it's true."
Knowledge
"You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness."
Courage
"Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?"
Existence
"Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach?Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you."
Grief
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