From my boyhood I have had an intense and overwhelming conviction that my real vocation lay in the direction of literature. I have, however, had a most unaccountable difficulty in getting any responsible person to share my views. -
As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.
There's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life.
Do you know the feeling you get when you are awakened in the middle of a dream? The dream story is still real and full of color, but the waking world is rushing back into your mind. And for a moment both worlds are true, and you cannot quite tell the...
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a stor...
Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this 'I'. You may encounter nothing more than an ever changing stream of consciousness, a flow of thoughts and feelings in which there is no real self to be discovered.
Let's say I find a lot of current American fiction too overwritten for my tastes, too self-conscious; I like something that's simpler and more direct. The story is what matters to me. I hope to make it seem real to readers, as if it happened just lik...
Some people who've read my story think I had a terrible childhood and that I was neglected or even abused, while others feel that my parents, while certainly flawed, also had truly wonderful qualities. And that's the way it should be, because in real...
There's some real dark days where you just feel like the story is falling apart in every one. Just keep moving forward, even when you are bluffing, even when you don't quite know what is going to happen next.
Alvin: I'd give each one of 'em a stick and, one for each one of 'em, then I'd say, 'You break that.' Course they could real easy. Then I'd say, 'Tie them sticks in a bundle and try to break that.' Course they couldn't. Then I'd say, "That bundle... ...
Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you ...
She didn't see him watching as he played, having no idea that Hans Hubermann's accordion was a story. In the times ahead, that story would arrive at 33 Himmel Street in the early hours of morning, wearing ruffled shoulders and a shivering jacket. It ...
Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us p...
Real Toby: [looking at jellybeans on a tray] I think one might be lime. One might be like mint. Real Harvey: Well, what's the difference between this and this? Real Toby: One's cherry, one's cinnamon. Real Harvey: You can tell that by just looking at...
I have very weirdly realistic dreams where it could be real life, except it's not.
People in real life cuss God out when they're angry. That's all real.
It's sad that you don't see drivers being real people.
The thing is that my father's story helps to communicate what was at stake with my mother, and my mother and father had so much a partnership that his story is integral to her story, as her story is to his - really, her story can't be told without hi...
I have this coat that I got in a nefarious deal years ago. It's a Johnny Carson coat, and I've had it remade three times. It's mine all the time. Carson was a real man, and I thought, 'Coats for real men by real men? I'm in.'
Reading may be the last secretive behavior that is neither pathological or prosecutable. It is certainly the last refuge from the real-time epidemic. For the stream of a narrative overflows the banks of the real. Story strips its reader, holding her ...
the real is coherent and probable because it is real, and not real because it is coherent...
