The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can’t have one without the other.
What cracks had he left in their hearts? Did they love less now and settle for less in return, as they held onto parts of themselves they did not want to give and lose again? Or – and he wished this – did they love more fully because they had survived pain, so no longer feared it?
For our excess we lost everything.
Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable – like I’m about to cry any second – and wrong. I’ve found that when that happens, it usually means I’m writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly.
Dat’s what they say of this cauntry back home, Kath: ‘America, the land of milk and honey.’ Bot they never tell you the milk’s gone sour and the honey’s stolen.
And that’s what I wanted: obliteration. Decimation. Just an instant smear of me right out of all this rising and falling and nothing changing that feels like living.
I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that’s the job of art.
One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.
As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character’s point of view and see where it goes.
I was really surprised at the success of ‘House of Sand and Fog,’ because it is so awfully dark. Believe it or not, when writing it, I never had the word ‘tragedy’ in my head – I wasn’t trying to write a dark book at all.
We are all living this dance and it is clearly fraught with making choices. Lots of my choices are bad and that’s normal. None of us are attractive at all times. What is attractive to me is authenticity.
I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air.
Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that’s going towards the book.
I think the writer’s job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined.