Writing teaches writing. Your writing will teach you how to write if you work hard enough and have enough faith.

Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing.

our finest writing will certainly come from what is unregenerate in ourselves. It will come from the part that is obdurate, unbanishable, immune to education, springing up like grass.

Envy is one of the scorpions of the mind, often having little to do with the objective, external world.

Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.

Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely.

To gain the book, one must give up all hope for the book. It is the only way the book can get written.

Fiction structures an experience for the reader to live through. ... That is why people read: to have experiences.

How we learn is what we learn.

The antidote to envy is one's own work. Always one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it. The answers you want can come only from the work itself.

An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth.

You are lost because you have not been being honest with yourself, and your life is largely unexamined and unexerted.

To master magical realism, one must make the real seem unreal but, more importantly, make the unreal seem real.

You need a very good financial person to keep you honest, and to keep track of income and outgo.

Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous

Did you ever hear of a kid playing accountant - even if they wanted to be one?

Recent warming coincides with rapid growth of human-made greenhouse gases. The observed rapid warming gives urgency to discussions about how to slow greenhouse gas emissions.

Southern white people despise the Negro as a race, and will do nothing to aid in his elevation as such; but for certain individuals they have a strong affection, and are helpful to them in many ways.

There was only one catch and that was catch 22

But do you know, I shall not be sorry to die. I shall be glad, Monsieur. And why glad, you ask? Because I love France and hate the Germans who have put this war on us.

I write short stories, and I wrote a play.