Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain.
It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.
Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.
Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is.
I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy.
But truly it was not the money that mattered. It was the distant glitter of everything that was possible in the world, the things she had always wanted for herself and could not name and called happiness because there was no other word.
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries...
If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.
The object of storytelling, like the object of magic, is not to explain or to resolve, but rather to create and to perform miracles of the imagination. To extend the boundaries of the mysterious. To push into the unknown in pursuit of still other unk...
Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.
The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral par...
Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.
My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.
Everyone acts stupid at some time in order to be loved.
I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become ...