What if we had born Bushmen in the Kalahari? What if our parents had been undernourished villagers in Uttar Pradesh, and we faced the problem of commanding the attention of the world on a diet of five...

Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals? We're all decent godless people, Hallie. Let's not be too hard on each other if we don't set the world afire. There's already been enough of that.

I don't care how they speculate, or what their answers are. We live as we can, we do what we must, and not everything goes by either Freudian or Victorian patterns. What I am sure of is that...

You've got a resilient temperament, Mister Morgan," Sally said. "I have to compensate for a woman who lives in constant anxiety, depression, and alarm.

Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don't warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn't differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to...

We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.

The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come.

I'm tired of hearing that the Lord shapes the back to the burden.

I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.

Poems ought to reflect the the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization.

Some of our superiors were indeed men of brains and learning and disinterested goodwill, but some were stuffed shirts, and some incompetents, and some timid souls escaping the fray, and some climbers,...

This place is like the back entrance to a black cow.

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim's Progress regions of motivation, hard work,...

No place is a place until it has found its poet.

If I had kept a journal, I could go back through it and check up on what memory reports plausibly but not necessarily truly. But keeping a journal then would have been like making notes while going...

She studied it soberly, with something like recognition or acknowledgment in her eyes, as if those who have been dead understand things that will never be understood by those who have only lived.

And so, by circuitous and unpredictable routes, we converge toward midcontinent and meet in Madison, and are at once drawn together, braided and plaited into a friendship. It is a relationship that...

A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people.

Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability. And inevitability takes careful pin-setting.

I was writing up a New Mexico snow-storm, I had it coming down thick and heavy, muffling the roads and mounding on adobe walls and windowsills and whitening the piñon and junipers when the tapping...

We're all tougher than we think we are. We're fixed so that almost anything heals.

If you wanted something, you planned for it, worked for it, and made it happen.

Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability.

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie.

She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones.

I didn't know myself well, and still don't. But I did know, and know now, the few people I loved and trusted. My feeling for them is one part of me I have never quarreled with, even though my...

You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? 'Sure He's a good teacher, but what's He published?

She will burn bright until she goes out; she will go on standing on tiptoe till she falls.

Good fortune, contentment, peace, happiness have never been able to deceive me for long. I expected the worst, and I was right. So much for the dream of man.

There are further considerations I might raise. How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? What are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is...