The constant happiness is curiosity.
A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.
One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.
Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.
I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.
I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn't that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn't mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.
You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.
In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.
Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.
people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one
That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.
Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.
I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.
It’s just life. You can’t beat life.
One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.
The thing is to be happy, no matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, you're just there, going along easy in the world.
People are curious. A few people are. ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.
It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, "Read," but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, "Don't read, don't think, just write," and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think, "There must be something else people do," you won't be able to quit.
My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.
The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.
The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.
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