“The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of whe...”

“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose its an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening child...”

“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.”

“I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.”

“The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.”

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily - perhaps not possibly - chronological. The time ...”

“On the whole I try to keep Modesty and Willie in timeless settings, which is why I avoid all the latest slang and in-words. It won't be long before 'brill' sounds as dated as 'super' does now. [Unc...”

“The instant is not in time -- time is in the instant.”

“Lo esperado no sucede. Es lo inesperado lo que acontece.”

“Worrying about things that havent happened yet is like riding on the hood of your carwhats the point?”

“The process of mind is mechanical, and the data of the thoughts and imagination can be changed, by changing the experiences and impressions of life.”