Writing is like a love affair: the beginning is the best part..

I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, eve….

No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realize they do not exist except in my mind I have a feeling of ….

Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story — ….

I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a voc….

I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and….

Decide what the rest of your life is to be. Whatever you are now, you might be forever..

Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream….

A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct..

I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist. If it is child's play….

All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner..

There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble..

I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live..

... appeals to memory were never perfectly answered..

There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I many never have another occasion. Stories are not ….

A short story is what you see when you look out of the window..

Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled..

[My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy..

She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient..