You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.

The idea that America exists in a culture of violence is bullshit. What America exists in is a culture of Kardashian.

Time is a face on the water.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

Take the dead from the dead, the old proverb said; only a corpse may speak true prophecy.

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.