Great Throughts Treasury

"Almost always, what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around."

"Also minimalism is a term that all of us who share so little in common and who are lumped together as minimalists are not terribly happy with."

"Adirondacks must sit in those uncomfortable wooden chairs with the seats tilted so deeply backward that your knees sprang up like a ventriloquist?s dummy as the wood pressed into the back of your thighs. Otherwise, why would they be so named?"

"I could name a few songs and say exactly what summer they came out and what boy I thought I was in love with when I was fourteen years old, but I think that music used to be really more a part of the culture when people went out dancing in a different way than they do now."

"Clich‚s so often befall vain people."

"Have been forced to close and have no idea when they may reopen."

"Hydrox cookies (what happened to them? They used to be so good. Sugar. No doubt they're leaving out sugar)"

"Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it."

"Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson."

"Because I don?t work with an outline, writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I?m on this rock, now I?m on this rock, now I?m on this rock."

"Falling in Place was meant to be very much rooted in a place and time, and music was a part of that."

"I became disenchanted with New York when I realized that I felt as if I had accomplished something when I picked up the laundry and got the Times and a quart of milk. I spent a lot of time worrying about alternate-side parking. I lived on the fourth floor of a brownstone. If I had messed up and hadn?t jockeyed my car to the right side of the street for the next day and somebody moved their car at four o?clock in the morning, it was an automatic response, in winter or summer, maybe I put my slippers on, but I would run down in my pajamas and get that place. All of a sudden I thought, This is absolutely ridiculous."

"Her prose has become known for its vivid particularity, the details of the way we live."

"I don't even correct people when they mispronounce my name now."

"I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality."

"I link all evils to the computer."

"I write about things that are mysterious to me."

"I wasn?t the sort of person who struck up conversations with strangers."

"I must say also that it's never worked to my disadvantage that I have long, blond hair."

"I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around."

"I think I write about things that are mysterious to me."

"I think that I'm serious, but I don't think that I'm inordinately bleak."

"I?m always amazed by my friends who were reading Samuel Beckett back when I was reading Wonder Woman. I didn?t think about books much in those days. I took a creative-writing course in high school, but only because it allowed me to skip gym."

"It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order."

"If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don't think I'd have trouble doing that."

"It was very much a surprise. It's very nice when someone takes notice."

"Italics provide a wonderful advantage: you see, right away, that the words are in a rush. When something exists at a slant, you can't help but consider irony."

"It took me years and years to realize a very simple thing, which is that when you write fiction you?re raising questions, and a lot of people think you?re playing a little game with them and that actually you know the answers to the questions. They read your question. They don?t know how to answer correctly. And they think that if they could only meet you personally and look into your eyes, you could give them the answers."

"It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant."

"It's gratifying that it does; I love to give readings."

"I've spent my life supporting myself."

"Might as well wear loafers without socks. Or take out a membership at the Reading Room on the path above the beach?the Reading Room, where the joke was that there wasn?t a book in the entire place."

"Jane remembers those years, though, as if they had been [a movie]--in part because her friends...always talked about everything as if it was over (Remember last night?), while holding out the possibility that whatever happened could be rerun. Neil didn't have that sense of things. He thought people shouldn't romanticize ordinary life. Our struggles, our little struggles, he would whisper, in bed, at night. Sometimes he or she would click on some of the flashlights and consider the ceiling, with the radiant swirls around the bright nuclei, the shadows like opened oysters glistening in brine. (In the '80s, the champagne was always waiting.)"

"It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that."

"It's not about having things figured out, or about communicating with other people, trying to make them understand what you understand. It's about a chicken dinner at a drive-in. A soft pillow. Things that don't need explaining."

"Minimalism is a term that all of us who share so little in common and who are lumped together as minimalists are not terribly happy with."

"Much of what happens in Love Always is really from overheard conversations in the Russian Tea Room. It's an improvisation of the way certain Hollywood agents think and talk to each other."

"My friends and I make great fun of the fact that I was labeled the so-called spokesperson for the generation. I don't think many writers write from that perspective. I'm sure John Updike doesn't sit around thinking, Boy, have I got the number on suburbia. He'd be horrified if he thought that was all he was up to."

"People forget years and remember moments."

"Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits."

"People who were dying: their minds always raced past whatever was being said, and still the pain went faster, leapfrogging ahead."

"Nothing is so lovely as a quietly snoring dog and some evening Brahms, as you sit in a comfortably overstuffed chair with your feet on the footstool."

"Quite often my narrator or protagonist may be a man, but I'm not sure he's the more interesting character, or if the more complex character isn't the woman."

"Read more quotes about 'Poetry'"

"Startled starlings flew up out of the high grass, their black whorl a little tornado that did not touch down and therefore did no damage. They disappeared like a momentary perception above Yancey?s head, fanning out and flying west. Or like the clotted words crammed into a cartoon bubble."

"The admiration of another writer?s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style."

"The real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children."

"The rum and Coke tastes just awful. He wishes he had Susan?s plain Coke."

"There is some reason, obviously, that you are drawn to your material, but the way in which you explore it might come to be quite different from what you would expect."

"This is a story, told the way you say stories should be told: Somebody grew up, fell in love, and spent a winter with her lover in the country. This, of course, is the barest outline, and futile to discuss. It?s as pointless as throwing birdseed on the ground while snow still falls fast. Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments. Seconds and symbols are left to sum things up: the black shroud over the pool. Love, in its shortest form, becomes a word. What I remember about all that time is one winter. The snow. Even now, saying snow, my lips move so that they kiss air. No mention has been made of the snowplow that seemed always to be there, scraping snow off our narrow road ? an artery cleared, though neither of us could have said where the heart was."