What good are insights? They only make things worse.

You're...writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read.

In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldnt turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.

Something’s died in me,” she goes. “It took a long time for it to do it, but it’s dead. You’ve killed something, just like you’d took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.

The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.

A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.

If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.