Annie Proulx quotes:

If you are looking for smart judging based on merit, skip the Academy Awards next year and pay attention to the Independent Spirit Awards.

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

Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.

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, the lack of direct human discourse, all in an atmosphere of scam and hustle.

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

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.

Ordinary parties, he thought, were subtle games of sexual and social badminton...

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

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

He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.

You got to think a musical instrument is human or, anyway, alive....You take a fiddle now, we say it has a neck, and in the human neck what do you find? Vocal cords like strings, where the sound comes from.

...hell was a great fiery-hot music hall, he thought, where untuned instruments scraped and shrieked in diabolical cacophany...

Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.

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

Wonderful ... I was up all night reading it, laughing and crying out in horror...

It takes a year, nephew... a full turn of the calendar, to get over losing someone.

I play the fiddle....I'm not much to listen to yet, but we got no mice in our house.

He had a feel for silence, for leading to an unsounded note the listener yearned for...

When the watermelons were as large as a child's head, the women boiled them, but they collapsed into a tasteless green mush that no one could eat, not the children, not the cow.

I wish I knew how to quit you.

We face up to awful things because we can't go around them, or forget them. 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 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.

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, world view and thoughts.

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

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

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.

What we fear we often rage against.

I didn't have a chance to buy you anything," she said, then held both closed hands toward him. Uncurled her fingers. In each cupped palm a brown egg. He took them. They were cold. He thought it a tender, wonderful thing to do. She had given him something, the eggs, after all, only a symbol, but they had come from her hands as a gift. To him. It didn't matter that he'd bought them himself at the supermarket the day before. He imagined she understood him, that she had to love him to know that it was the outstreched hands, the giving, that mattered.

A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.

If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here it was as though he had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it.

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

It's easier to die if others around you are dying.

There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it.

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

Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once? Some might sting the tongue, some invoke night perfume. Some had centers as bitter as gall, some blended honey and poison, some were quickly swallowed. And among the common bull's-eyes and peppermints a few rare ones; one or two with deadly needles at the heart, another that brought clam and gentle pleasure. Were his fingers closing on that one?

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

Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart. "I'm coming back some day," they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore.

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.

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

I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language

In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.

But the only rhyme he could summon for 'out' was 'sauerkraut,' which lacked poetic glory. He let it go. The right line would come in time. That was the thing about poetry. It crept up through the draws and coulees of the brain.

No wonder, he thought, that the panhandle people were a godly lot, for they lived in sudden, violent atmospheres. Weather kept them humble.

I would rather be dead than not read

...all them things I don't know could get you killed if I come to know them

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.

Change itself is what fascinates me. I am drawn, as a moth to the flame, by edge situations, by situations of metamorphosis.

and they shook hands, hit each other on the shoulder, then there was forty feet of distance between them and nothing to do but drive away in opposite directions. Within a mile Ennis felt like someone was pulling his guts out hand over hand a yard at a time. He stopped at the side of the road and, in the whirling new snow, tried to puke but nothing came up. He felt about as bad as he ever had and it took a long time for the feeling to wear off.