Annie Proulx Quotes

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.

It is my feeling that a story is not finished until it is read, and that the reader finishes it through his or her life experience, prejudices, worldview and thoughts.

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.

We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.

I wish I knew how to quit you.

Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place.

What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.

Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways, accumulating so subtly that they seem not to exist. Yet the tiny shifts in everything--cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks--press inexorably on and on.

We face up to awful things because we can't go around them, or forget them. The sooner you get it over with, the sooner you say 'Yes, it happened, and there's nothing I can do about it,' the sooner you can get on with your own life. You've got children to bring up. So you've got to get over it. What we have to get over, somehow we do. Even the worst things.

What we fear we often rage against.

Anyway, there's something wrong with everybody and it's up to you to know what you can handle.

Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.

I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language

If you can't fix it, you have to stand it.

And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.

And I think that's important, to know how the water's gone over the dam before you start to describe it. It helps to have been over the dam yourself.

All the travelin I ever done is going around the coffeepot looking for the handle.

If a piece of knotted string can unleash the wind, and if a drowned man can awaken, then I believe a broken man can heal.

For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, and that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.

... there are four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman.

I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.

I rarely use the internet for research, as I find the process cumbersome and detestable. The information gained is often untrustworthy and couched in execrable prose. It is unpleasant to sit in front of a twitching screen suffering assault by virus, power outage, sluggish searches, system crashes and the lack of direct human discourse.

Archie was an expert at dividing the affairs of life into men's business and women's business. An empty cupboard and a full plate were the man's business, a full cupboard and an empty plate the concern of the woman.