I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.

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.

A writer always writes.

Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.

Our connections to the Oneness of the Universe/God are both physical/atomic matter and nonphysical spiritual/energy.

Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone.

The word courage - God, I love that word. Words are so important to me.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

I grew up as a kid being able to attend concerts, go to art museums. Santa Barbara was a rich cultural community, and I had access to everything. I think that shaped me as an artist.

Truly life is wasted on the living.

Go To statement considered harmful.

You have to be an extremely good reader to appreciate what a good writer is. There are some people who are completely insensitive to good writing.