I sit and pass judgment on myself: this is dull, this is unclear, this is insignificant: ergo I am dull, I am unclear, I am insignificant.

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

The human desire to know why is as powerful as the desire to know what happened next, and it is a desire of a higher order.

The only justification for writing a novel is that it should be wonderful. Adequate is inadequate.

What matters is not publication or success (success is bad for your prose) but the practice of the imaginative act. Our damaged values depend on it.

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of rearing and peering from the bent tip of a grass blade, looking for a route.

Part of the trouble is that I've never properly understood that some disasters accumulate, that they don't all land like a child out of an apple tree.

In Literature, only trouble is interesting.

What is the pattern of change?

If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background, and as in a painting's composition, the foreground may be in harmony or in conflict with the background.

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

The true purpose of your life is your ultimate abode.

If only…the saddest words in the English language.

You must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences.

Man was created to complete the horse.

Mozart didn't need a scheme for his music. He played and sang with the heavenly lightness of a child.

i felt my being flutter. each tousled head that came through the door i wanted to be his, but no and on, a dozen boys entered, yet not the one.

The very best and noblest attainment in this life is to be silent and let God work and speak within. Therefore it is said: 'In the midst of silence the secret word was spoken to me'.

I love children. I'd prefer to be around children much more than adults, actually. And I like animals, too. I'm just really into beings who are at ease with themselves.

Stories worked much the same way . . . A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.