The passive voice could always be used to obscure blame.

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.

Have you decided how great you want to be? It’s really up to you. Greatness is a choice.

All that we have and don't have is a grace. Even the awareness of grace is a grace in which we should give thanks."

God gives the nuts but he does not crack them.

But far more numerous was the herd of stfch Who think too little and who talk too much.

When you're at dinner with somebody and they are on their phone. I think there's that lost art of conversation and so I just always try to keep my phone far away from me when I'm with people.

Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.

I do read everything that we publish. We usually have to have two or three votes for a book before we take it on. So in that sense I suppose it is an orchestra.

We are known to our friends by a look in our eyes that we never see in a mirror.

Las personas con un alto nivel de tolerancia al aburrimiento tienen tiempo de sobra para pensar.

I don't choose to analyze what I have done and I think that is the right choice, because then I won't be spending my time creating.