Occupation: Writer Birth: April 22, 1923 Death: March 1, 2017
Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life..
A lie hides the truth. A story tries to find it..
Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase b….
Words are nets through which all truth escapes..
I taught writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania for a number of years and I realized that all you can do is encourage people and give them….
My life was incoherent to me. I felt it quivering, spitting out broken teeth..
The truth came slowly like a story told by people interrupting each other..
When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path..
I've always known a lot of very bad people, destructive, brutes of a certain kind. Then I've seen these lovely impulses and what not, and they've sta….
Freedom is a public library..
When I had a few francs, I spent them at a café on the Place de Longchamps, a block or so from my pension, where I could order a glass of Beaujolais ….
My father brought me a box of books once when I was about three and a half or four. I remember the carton they were in and the covers with illustrati….
I have a painter's memory. I can remember things from my childhood which were so powerfully imprinted on me, the whole scene comes back..
My first job was working in a dress shop in Los Angeles in 1940, for $7 a week..
I like to cook; it is, for me, a happy combination of mindlessness and purpose..
You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening..
If a person had accused him of meanness, he could have defended himself. But with a dog - you did something cheap to it when you were sure no one was….
It was hard to reassure grown-ups when you weren't certain yourself what you were feeling and thinking—when thoughts dissolved before you could name ….
People steal into one's consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along..