There are very few innocent sentences in writing.
The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.
Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...
You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing— your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.
No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable … If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as - and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be - lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason or even to go on living, before they were 'saved.
They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us here, but the fact is that religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's atheist's— arrogance, blind certainty, a closed-mindedness that's like an imprisonment so complete that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.
Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it's my own choices that'll lock me in, it seems unavoidable--if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.
There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.
Time wasn't passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once-comely bod.
What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle.
...when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing — not nothing, but Nothing, an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with.
I guess a bit part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.
How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to chose how you construct meaning from experience.
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.
