Bag of Bones

Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.

For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.

The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.

I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.

I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.

This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.

I was being paid to do what I loved, and there's no gig on earth better than that; it's like a license to steal.

Her body was wrapped in shadows like moth wings, like rose-petals.

A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again.

I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.

So what, ghosts can't hurt you. That's what I thought then.

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.

...fear is actually an acronym for Fuck Everything And Run.

A writer is a man who has taught his mind to misbehave.

The dream didn't fade as dreams usually do upon waking.

the look of the sky as the day's blue blood runs out of its cheek.

The water was glassy and calm, still candy-colored in the afterglow of sunset.

Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even if they try their best to be identical, because they're never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.

And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.

Any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society's map. What others don't know about it is what makes it yours.

What comes in when daylight leaves is a kind of certainty: that beneath the skin there is a secret, some mystery both black and bright. You feel this mystery in every breath, you see it in every shadow, you expect to plunge into it at every turn of a step.

When one has little faith, one must survive from day to day signs-

Murder is the worst kind of pornography, murder is let me do what I want taken to its final extreme.

My first editor used to say that eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist's head is none of his business, a sentiment I've never believed should be restricted to just writers.

I don't call people for help. It's not because of the way I was raised, at least I don't think so; it's the way I was made. Johanna once said that if I was drowning at Dark Score Lake, where we have a summer home, I would die silently fifty feet out from the public beach rather than yell for help. It's not a question of love or affection. I can give those and I can take them. I feel pain like anyone else. I need to touch and be touched. But if someone asks me, 'Are you all right?' I can't answer no. I can't say help me.

When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing-

Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there,” Hardy supposedly said, “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.” I understood because that was what I felt like in those interminable, dissembling days: a bag of bones.

The sun had burned through and the day had gone from dull to dazzling, yet in the west blask-satin thunderheads continued to stack up. It was as if night has burst a blood-vessel in the sky over there.