An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

They stared into the distance as though they were being absorbed into an alternate space-time reality. Perhaps they were. But probably they already had been.

Discovery's friend is creativity

The hotter the furnace the finer the gold.

I like to know that when I'm 90 years old, I'm going to be able to look at a song or poem I wrote and say, "Wow! I remember I was so crazy about this person," or "I remember what that day felt like."

A thousand plastic flowers don't make a desert bloom. A thousand empty faces don't fill an empty room".

Don't waste your energy on those who don't get on your bus.

"Margaret" was just my truth. It was what I knew to be true about sixth grade.

We must believe that He is able to do what He will, wise to do what is best, and good, according to His promise, to do what is best for us, if we love Him, and serve Him.

Art is, nowadays, our new religion and museums are our cathedrals.

From this hour, freedom! Going where I like, my own master.