I never, ever would or did rob anyone in my life.
In a sense, I may not consciously know what I'm doing. I feel that I'm telling a story. I'm a kind of medium by which something is transmitted.
I never change, I simply become more myself.
Novels usually evolve out of 'character. ' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.
Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.
I'm so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.
I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
Love obeys no laws other than its own.
Some people', Miss R. said,'run to conceits or wisdom but I hold to the hard, brown, nutlike word. I might point out that there is enough aesthetic excitement here to satisfy anyone but a damned fool.