The first thing we see about a short story is its mystery. And in the best short stories, we return at the last to see mystery again

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.

Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.

Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.

We are the breakers of our own hearts

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

The secret of the truly successful ... is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.

People like you are the reason People like me need medication.

A genuinely happy person is one who has rendered others happy.

If we get too caught up in the rhetoric of meditation, we will miss the point. The point was to go beyond rhetoric.

I speak my mind. If it offends some people, well, there's not much I can do about that. But I'm going to be honest. I'm going to continue to speak my mind, and that's who I am.

The children are being conditioned to think that the purpose of life is to get a good job. You get paid but you don't get satisfaction from your work.

It’s in the very trickery that it pleases me. But show me how the trick is done, and I have lost my interest therein.

I never looked around me because it might freak me out, because if you're up on a mountain you don't wanna like, look down.

When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.

One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.