“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.”

“Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the p...”

“For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us...”

“Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A goo...”

“The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.”

“The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and nationality. His true country, his home, was that of the imagination.”

“Semua orang pernah patah hati. All you have to do is move on.”

“A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.”

“If you only write when youre inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but youll never be a novelist because youre going to have to make your word count today and those words arent going to wait fo...”