I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art..

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

A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within..

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, ea….

There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer..

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 revel….

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up….

When they turned off, it was still early in the pink and green fields. The fumes of morning, sweet and bitter, sprang up where they walked. The inse….

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

No art ever came out of not risking your neck..

How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk--experiment--is a considerable….

Write about what you don't know about what you know..

We are the breakers of our own hearts.

The first act of insight is throw away the labels..

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

One place understood helps us understand all places better.

To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most..

Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its ….

Never think you've seen the last of anything..

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..

One place comprehended can make us understand other places better..