The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.
It’s so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything – it’s a process, but then it isn’t. It’s working all the time.
I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability – the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.
I wanted us to share the sense that the number of wrong moves far exceeds the number of good moves, to share the frightening instability of the correct decision, to bond in being confounded.
Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?
I’m not nervous if I think about something for nine years and then I don’t write it. Even if it fades it doesn’t concern me. It’ll come back if it’s worth it.
I had an epiphany: I was a loser.
A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I’m writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.
I actually didn’t listen to the Beatles song ‘Nowhere Man’ when I was writing my book of the same name. What I listened to a lot was ‘Abbey Road.’ Its disjointedness and its readiness to confuse only to delight were inspiring to me.
We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred.
I cannot stand that whole game of confession, that is: Here I have sinned, now I’m confessing my sins, and describing my path of sin and then in the act of confession I beg for your forgiveness and redemption.
I did not intend to stay; I had no experience in the United States – I may have been here less than 24 hours – but I knew I would never get inside there. And ‘there’ not being America necessarily, but that harmonious mode of living that some people are lucky enough to have in this country.
The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.
The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough.
There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write.
I don’t know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.
It’s difficult for me to understand how it was possible to live under the Bush regime for eight years and then just roll over and do other things.
In some way there is no real life. It’s always the story of your life that you’re living.
I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better.
You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated.