By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?

There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.

Every time. You know why? I want to fail. I work like a dog for twenty years so I'll have the supreme pleasure of failing. Never knew anybody like that, did you? I'm very cunning. I plan it in advance. I fool myself right up to the last minute, and then the time comes and I know how cunningly I've been planning it all the time. I've been a failure all my life.

There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.