Quotes from Bret Lott

I felt on my back gentle pats like fragile wings just touching me, touching me: my grandchildren's hands.

Tell the truth, but understand that it is not necessarily what happened," is one of the things she told him. "Every good story is a parable," is another.

literary fiction is fiction that examines the character of the people involved in the story, and that popular fiction is driven by plot. Whereas popular fiction, I tell them, is meant primarily as a means of escape, one way or another, from this present life, a kind of book equivalent of comfort food, literary fiction confronts us with who we are and makes us look deeply at the human condition.

Brenda Ueland, in her book If You Want to Write, writes of her own why: "At last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them, if they cared to hear it. If they did not—fine.

men were off the road and onto our yard now, their eyes never yet looking up to us; men I couldn't place from anywhere. I looked behind me to Momma, saw her there with a hand to her face, covering her eyes, the other hand at her throat and holding on to the collar of her dress. I turned to the sound of the men on the porch steps, felt myself backing up too. The four of them moved toward me, struggling with the burden they bore, the wool blanket seeming heavier than

Your momma and daddy leave you at some point, and then you are on your own.

So I had him go to work, because it occurred to me that even when your wife leaves you, you still have to show up for work.