Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

- Allan Gurganus

Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, pok…

- Allan Gurganus

You have a different kind of tenderness for everybody you know.

- Allan Gurganus

There's a kind of ear music . . . a rhythmic synchronicity which creates a kind of heartbeat on the page.

- Allan Gurganus

Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.

- Allan Gurganus

Writing is a kind of free fall that you then go back and edit and shape.

- Allan Gurganus

Writing means being a fascinated slave to current events.

- Allan Gurganus

You know, right often, the body is the best thing we’ve got going for us. A body itself is a shiny object. Something!

- Allan Gurganus

I think Walt Whitman went to the help wanted section and found a squib that said "Wanted: National Poet." And he was innocent enough to believe there…

- Allan Gurganus