If you are looking for smart judging based on merit skip the Academy Awards next year and pay attention to the Independent Spirit Awards.
Anyway there's something wrong with everybody and it's up to you to know what you can handle.
It's easier to die if others around you are dying.
If a piece ofknotted string can unleash the wind and if a drowned man can awaken... then I believe a broken man can heal.
We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.
No wonder he thought that the panhandle people were a godly lot for they lived in sudden violent atmospheres. Weather kept them humble.
What we fear we often rage against.
All the travelin I ever done is going around the coffeepot looking for the handle.
Wonderful ... I was up all night reading it laughing and crying out in horror...
A spinning coin still balanced on its rim may fall in either direction.
Ordinary parties he thought were subtle games of sexual and social badminton...
I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity brevity balance and word play of the short story.
You know one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.
Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart. "I'm coming back some day " they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore.
I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language
It takes a year nephew... a full turn of the calendar to get over losing someone.
In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.
When the watermelons were as large as a child's head the women boiled them but they collapsed into a tasteless green mush that no one could eat not the children not the cow.
Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.
I would rather be dead than not read
Change itself is what fascinates me. I am drawn as a moth to the flame by edge situations by situations of metamorphosis.
... there are four women in every manâ??s heart. The Maid in the Meadow the Demon Lover the Stouthearted Woman the Tall and Quiet Woman.
And I think that's important to know how the water's gone over the dam before you start to describe it. It helps to have been over the dam yourself.
...hell was a great fiery-hot music hall he thought where untuned instruments scraped and shrieked in diabolical cacophany...
It is my feeling that a story is not finished until it is read and that the reader finishes it through his or her life experience prejudices world view and thoughts.
If you can't fix it you have to stand it.
I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.
I play the fiddle....I'm not much to listen to yet but we got no mice in our house.
Writing comes from reading and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
If you get the landscape right the characters will step out of it and they'll be in the right place.
I wish I knew how to quit you.
...all them things I don't know could get you killed if I come to know them
And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.
He had a feel for silence for leading to an unsounded note the listener yearned for...
Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love which wrenched and wounded. Not love which came only once.
There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe but nothing could be done about it and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it.