After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.

The bulls are my best friends." I translated to Brett. "You kill your friends?" she asked. "Always," he said in English, and laughed. "So they don't kill me.

I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it.

There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.

The fools think I am writing algebra but what I am really writing is geometry.

To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again, . . . to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on a tent, to know where I can find what I want.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.