Annie Proulx

“I wish I knew how to quit you.”

“There are no harmless secrets.”

“If you can't fix it, you've got to stand it.”

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

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

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page.”

“Love is a force of nature.”

“The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.”

“For a writer, the most important thing is to read.”

“What we love is a stone in the heart.”

“I am not a writer who thinks about audience. I'm just a writer who writes.”

“And the thing that balances the terror of being alive is the sheer wonder of it.”

“I believe if you're going to write about a place, you have to live there and have some sort of understanding about it.”

“There's no controlling a running horse.”

“You get to a certain age and you're just glad to be there.”

“Most of the people in the world are poor, so if you're writing about people, you're probably going to be writing about poor people.”

“A screenplay is not a finished product but a blueprint for a film, and a good director can make a good film out of a bad screenplay and vice versa.”

“The whole world revealed as a place where only the strongest had a chance to survive.”

“We're all strange inside.”