Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.

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.

Being with boys is more dangerous for me than killing a cricket or having a bird fly into the house.

Our active civil position will lead us to the manifestation of the glory of God in our nation

Just as Jimmy Stewart and Tyrone Power get 50 percent of the profits, so do I.

My first instrument was the piano; I played in the church, and before that I sang in church. I didnt learn the guitar until I was 24 years old.

Things said to a reporter in confidence should be kept in confidence.

This search for what you want is like tracking something that doesn't want to be tracked. It takes time to get a dance right, to create something memorable.

You don't want to get that sort of sound in your writing that boing that gives you away.

A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew.

A man who cannot be enticed by money or intimidated by the threat of jail or death has two of the strongest weapons that anyone has to offer.