Sometimes, in that darkness, there is a single act of love, some selfless gesture, an aspiration, and we see that it's not been all waste, all hopeless, and we can ... well ... go on.

Our salvation never comes in the form we would have chosen.

Uninvited criticism is insult.

A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.

Obscenities are too often used for shock value, as a kind of shorthand for real expression of emotion. You've got to scale down your monstrosities. A scream is not a discovery.

Let good people sin. Give virtue to rotters.

Nothing on earth in fiction is less interesting than characters under the influence of alcohol.

Plot does not simply move with time, but spreads out conceptually in metaphorical space.

Using language like jungle growth isn't the solution to telling a story.

There's something about a parenthesis in fiction that puts one off, saying, "It's me, moi, jumping in now."

What a strange thing it is to recognize a sound like the shriek of a wounded animal, when you've never heard the shriek of a wounded animal.

Convictions are prisons.

...He was wrong about the sadness though: far better to have it when you're young. A sad pretty girl inspires the urge to console, unlike a sad old crone.

They might think you are being delusional for dreaming big, but so did a lot people think about most great individuals before their greatness.

But I also realize that winning doesn't always mean getting first place

Leisure of itself gives pleasure and happiness and enjoyment of life, which are experienced, not by the busy man, but by those who have leisure.

It can be scary to be everywhere else for a long time. I always feel that I'm safe at home, near my family.

She was crawling out from under the huge tour bus when he first caught sight of her. She was small, like a child.

Politicians, like bombers, seldom see their victims.

Make money your god, and it will plague you like the devil.

She felt like a fictional character who'd escaped the book in which her creator had carefully and kindly trapped her, taken a pair of scissors to her outline and leaped, free.