“The question ‘Why poetry?’ isn’t asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting qu...”
0 likes
Author detail
This author page remains available for legacy URL compatibility, including alias-backed slug support.
Quotes
Showing 1-17 of 17
“The question ‘Why poetry?’ isn’t asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting qu...”
0 likes
“If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.”
“It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?”
“And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.”
0 likes
“I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more pe...”
“Then, what's the matter?' I wonder, in fact, how many times I have said that or something equal to it to a woman passing palely through my life. What're you thinking? What's made you so quie...”
“Real mystery - the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book - was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent...”
“Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.”
0 likes
“I decided early on that I wanted to participate in the greater American experience, rather than the parochial one in Mississippi. But I have an urge as a writer to meld the Southern experien...”
0 likes
“In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.”
0 likes
“Well, I believe in the idea of 'normal' in the way that I believe in the idea of logic. Or the idea of character. All of these ethical constructs are just that: constructs.”
0 likes
“I haven't scoured Dixie out of my voice. But I don't think that the books that I have written... have really in any way been Southern in character.”
0 likes
“That said, being dyslexic, I wasn't a great reader when I was kid.”
0 likes
“I'm an equal opportunity reader - although I don't much read plays. And since I was raised a Presbyterian, pretty much all pleasures are guilty.”
0 likes
“My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.”
0 likes
“For a writer, children make life needlessly hard. I've muddled through a lot of things, but I have not muddled through my writing life. I work absolutely flat out, giving it my all.”
0 likes
“The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better.”
0 likes