William Goyen Quotes

For me, environment is all. Place — as I was saying about my students — is absolutely essential.

Maybe solitude is best had in the midst of multitudes.

It’s amazing how quickly something gets written. Now, when it comes, it can be on a bus, or in a store. I’ve stopped in Macy’s and written on a dry-goods counter and then suddenly had a whole piece of writing for myself that was accomplished, where earlier in my life I felt I had to spend a week in a house somewhere in the country in order to get that. Conditions change.

There’s nothing better than an elegant cry of despair.