Amy Hempel
Amy Hempel
Amy Hempelis an American short story writer and journalist. She teaches creative writing at Bennington College and University of Florida...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth14 December 1951
CountryUnited States of America
mother heart thinking
Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber thinking it was zucchini. That's the kind of thing that turns my heart right over.
thinking way
I am not quite myself, I think.But who here is quite himself? And yet there is a way in which we are all more ourselves than ever, I suppose.
thinking laughing cartoon
I think you would like Warren. He drinks Courvoisier in a Coke can, and has a laugh like you'd find in a cartoon bubble.
thinking hands talking
I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
thinking men ifs
What I think," Chatty says, "is that if a man loves a woman more than a woman loves a man, then they're even.
spiritual thinking looks
Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.
thinking space saws
The other day I was playing Scrabble. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? What was the word I made?
home thinking looks
I know that homes burn and that you should think what to save before they start to. Not because, in the heat of it, everything looks as valuable as everything else. But, because nothing looks worth the bother, not even your life.
lying mean thinking
I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies. Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and over again: Is this the truth, or not? I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I understand it, the western tradition is: Put your cards on the table.
writing thinking stories
I know when a story is finished when there is not a single thing more I can think to do to it. And since I know at the start what the last line will be, I know when I've reached that point as logically as I can that it's finished. As for the rewriting-it's not foolproof, of course, but if you're honest about having thought of every possibility and you still come back to what you have, what more can you do?
dog smell differences
I told him about the way they get to know you. Not the way people do, the way they flatter you by wanting to know every last thing about you, only it isn't a compliment, it is just efficient, a person getting more quickly to the end of you. Correction - dogs do want to know every last thing about you. They take in the smell of you, they know from the next room, asleep, when a mood settles over you. The difference is there's not an end to it.
men years vases
The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.
people stories levels
I assemble stories-me and a hundred million other people-at the sentence level. Not by coming up with a sweeping story line.
mother father sorrow
When my mother died, my father's early widowhood gave him social cachet he would not have had if they had divorced. He was a bigger catch for the sorrow attached.