66 Quotes About Good-writing

Beyond the rock where we sheltered there was a blackness filled with screams where all the gods unknown to us had been released.

He is unable to think in words. The shells begin once again to pound the water around him, to make it into a bloody broth of metal and the dead.

This time Sophie felt very different in Rafal's arms as he flew over the bay. Instead of safe, she felt scared; instead of loved, she felt caged.

Her name, he says like the Lord's taken in vain. Sometimes he says "Mexico," and the word has nothing in it at all. A wall with no colors painted on it.

The jacaranda in the courtyard has put on its bloom. This purple can't be ignored, it's like a tree singing. The walk down Londres Street to the market is a concert: the small jacaranda on the the corner hums the tuning note, then all others in the lane join in.

She was magnificent. She wasn't so much a person as an event, a gigantic presence.

No, I was not going to work. I was an artist, a lover, a lover of women, of the oppressed and downtrodden, a warrior really. I should have been somewhere leading an armed revolution in the name of love and no, I was not going to work.

What I expect from a good story is that it will tell me today what I can't know from any other source but that story, from its unique way of putting something into words, from the feeling that it implies.

I should say here that being chronically sleep-deprived is so demonstrably similar to being drunk that hospitals often feel like giant, ceaseless office Christmas parties. Except that at a Christmas party the schmuck standing next to you isn't about to fillet your pancreas with something called a “hot knife.