The cloven-foot of self-interest was now and then to be seen aneath the robe of public principle.
I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.
The cold was our pride, the snow was our beauty. It fell and fell, lacing day and night together in a milky haze, making everything quieter as it fell, so that winter seemed to partake of religion in a way no other season did, hushed, solemn.
People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.
Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to 'tell a story. ' They want to tell it all - the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself. That includes a story, but also the whole expanding universe of sensation and thought. . . Memoirists wish to tell their mind. Not their story.
I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow--or kneel or get knocked down--to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be.
My father was grounded, a very meat-and-potatoes man. He was a baker.
We create the world we live in. If we want to change what we don't like in the world, we must start by changing what we don't like about ourselves.
I knew I could make money from songwriting, so how much and when was not really the question.
Finally someone takes me seriously enough to ask for my word of honor, and it’s a villain.