Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a 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.

know what you want, work to get it, then value it once you have it.

Doing what I like to do, the way I like to do it ... makes me happy.

Real love is a humble receptivity of a silent heart that is prepared to melt and merge…

Though my eyes cannot see beyond what I can see, I can see beyond what I cannot see

For the bored souls, sometimes sea is the best answer!

After all these years, it's still embarrassing for me to play on the American golf tour. Like the time I asked my caddie for a sand wedge and he came back ten minutes later with a ham on rye.

When other sects speak well of Zen, the first thing that they praise is its poverty.

It's a pitch you can extend your career with because it's less taxing on your body. It's like dog years, but in reverse. I feel like I'm 27 or 26 in knuckleball years!

L.A. makes you feel ugly.

Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.