Reading honest literature makes you love the world. Knowledge and understanding are love. Reading educates our feelings and enhances our sympathy. Wh….

I used to believe that love and happiness were synonymous. I was a fool. Love intensifies all emotions. Nothing is so painful o so sweet, so thrillin….

The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written..

You will feel discouraged; you will lose confidence in your abilities; you will be bored with the characters–and the only way to overcome these obsta….

Love is anticipation and memory, uncertainty and longing. It’s unreasonable, of course. Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope and pleasure ….

Love is always a surprise and you never get it right..

Novels are written, not wished into existence. You have to sit your ass in the chair or nothing gets done..

Writing a story, you understand, is not done by consensus. But we do learn from each other, and we remind ourselves how important this work we're doi….

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety..

Place is character. And all writing is regional..

You can't possibly conduct a proper affair without a lot of deliberating, scheming, speculating, and conniving. It's a delicate balance where the exc….

The regional tags are often pejorative and dismissive. Don't think of place-bound stories, in other words, but of stories with a strong sense of plac….

Every person in therapy has a love disorder..

You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it..

The universe may be tenderly indifferent to our fate, but we shouldn’t be. We are our brothers’ keepers. There is right, and there is wrong. There ar….

I was reading for understanding. I wanted to do to a reader what Salinger did for me..

Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place..

A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?.

We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our live….

The facts, however, are unimportant in fiction. It's not the events of my life that I mine, but the emotional experiences I've had..

I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me..