“In the end nothing matters but the work. You can’t control how it’s taken, and the act of telling a story always involves a gap. Sometimes confusion is the risk of ambiguity–I say that to students all the time. It’s true at the fireside and it’s true in the parlor, and it’s true in made-up towns and New York. Two humans face one another, words come out of one, words go into the other mind through the ears and eyes of the listener. It’s a story. It’s simple. The gap is the thing. Make sure you build the bridge.”
“Writing nonfiction means I tell people s stories for them, not because they re special but because we all are.”
“There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this poem that has been around for so many hundreds of years that you just have to sit back and, with nothing else in mind, laugh out loud. ”
“I think if a story has a message it should be incidental and accidental, otherwise it leans too close to indoctrination.”
“When I got home, I seemed in a dream. My windows looked upon hers; I remained all the day looking at them, and all the day they were closed and dark. I forgot everything for this woman; I slept not, I eat nothing. That evening I fell into a fever, the next morning I was delirious, and the next evening I was DEAD! Dead! cried his hearers. Dead! answered the narrator, with a conviction in his voice which words alone cannot give; dead as Fabian, the cast of whose dead face hangs from that wall! Go on, whispered the others, holding their breath. The hail still rattled against the windows, and the fire had so nearly died out, that they threw more wood on the feeble flame which penetrated the darkness of the studio and cast a faint light upon the pale face of him who told the story. ( The Dead Man s Story”
“In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they know you well enough not only to say, It s Tuesday, Amy must be helping out at the library today, but well enough to say to the librarian, after you ve left the building, You know, Amy just loves reading to the four-year-olds, I think it s been such a comfort for her since her little boy died —if they know you like that, you can do almost anything where they can t see you, and when they hear about it, they will, as we do, simply disbelieve the narrator.”
“Statements make sense for somebody who needs advice. I’m not giving advice. I don’t instruct. At my best, I delight. That’s my job.”
“The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through? I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself it is all right as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but if I m such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay, you re sunk. If they aren t in interesting situations, characters can t be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them. (Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)”