“It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.”
“The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.”
“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
“Planning to write is not writing.”
“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.”
“I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.”
“Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
“You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”
“Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”
“At its best the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace.”
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
“The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by discouraging rational inquiry.”
“By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.”
“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in.”
“Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul.”
“We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.”
“I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to ignore their talk and judge only their actions.”