Editing is just ongoing. I don't count drafts, or know what would fully constitute a draft. But I try to fix as I go. And there's always more to fix.

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.

Paint the sky of life with colors that only you can create!

Can it be true that freedom only exists when it is a treasure, shared by all?

Be sure that your soul is never so intensely alive as when in the deepest abnegation it waits hushed before God .

That's what great art does - it inspires other artists to do great art, and that's what it should do.

If those guys with better genes trained as hard and intense as me, I wouldn't stand a chance!

Growing up during the Cold War period, I always found that, although we always thought that the world would end in some sort of nuclear holocaust, at some point, everybody was pretty hopeful.

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise, Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.

Charles Laughton signed me to my first movie contract at 17. He later asked my parents if he could adopt me.

We're always on the side of the animal that's being chased. We always seem to be on the side of the rabbit or the fox and not on the side of the hounds.

It isn't cool to abuse the ability to swing.