We have been married a little over a year and already there is a terrible silence around some subjects. We never speak of the disappearance of my brothers — a stranger listening to us would think it...

I have seen statues that would look stodgy beside her, I have seen painted Madonnas whose features would be coarse beside her pale luminous loveliness.

A plot, whether abandoned by a reader or pursued rapturously, remains itself, and gets where it is headed even if nobody is looking.

Oh, the accident necessary to fiction!

Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity.

Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or...

Passion is sweeter split strand by strand.

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words:...

There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.

Father O'Neil was putting hymnals in the backs of the pews when Puller and Knox walked in. Knox crossed herself as they walked up the aisle.

According to our Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, people do not write well when they are happy. If you are content with life, you simply want to enjoy it.

If you memorize three hundred Tang poems, you might be able to write a little.

He was a man who knew there were such things as jokes in the world or people would not write about them, but had never actually been introduced to one or shaken its hand.

I read The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favorite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state...

Dorothy L. Sayers used to say that mystery stories were the only moral fiction of the modern world - because in a mystery, you were guaranteed to see that the bad got punished, the good got rewarded...

Sometimes words need music too. Sometimes the descriptions are not enough. Books should be written with soundtracks, like films.

He doesn't need my help coming up with pranks. He's got too many ideas of his own. - Daja referring to Briar in their first year at Discipline cottage

Narziss was dark and thin of face, and Goldmund open and radiant as a flower. Narziss was a thinker and anatomiser, Goldmund a dreamer and a child. Yet things common to both could bridge these...

The next summer we went to France for six weeks, and I added another 420 words, most of them found in the popular gossip magazine, 'Voici'. Man-eater, I'd say. Gold digger, roustabout, louse. Who are...

The houses looked like something a child might draw, a row of shaky squares with triangles on top. Add a door, add two windows. Think of putting a tree in the front yard, and then decide against it...

What is it? I ask, opening the folded page. It's an article on your hero, Donald Trump. McDermott grins.

Is there some vital connection between Norman church architecture and the milking of beef cattle of which I am unaware?

He could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.

The exaltation of understanding; then understanding's bottomless regret.

Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and...

Asshole cunt peepee fuck. Ah, grinned Old Sludge, showing his one tooth, going to the company store to get some algae chewies, huh? Goddamn poopoo, I would grin back at him.

I am creating an atmosphere! Oh, Unc, we've finally got bodies in this joint! Paying bodies. We could have a good racket going here. I'm not interested in a 'racket.' I'm an academic. That's okay,...

It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it.

Did the little girl witness a murder? No. She stole a medal that was worth a suitcase full of money. Ranger raised his eyebrows and grinned. Good for her. I like to see enterprise in kids.

There's always tomorrow. Exactly, she said, finishing off her first doughnut, selecting a second. Maybe she wouldn't starve to death, she decided. Maybe she'd eat herself into obesity and explode....