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.
I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life.
For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy.
What’s so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writers, there is a sort of knowledge of the other. We have a lot more in common than we realize, and I think writing is really a sustained act of empathy.
I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I’ve always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.
I truly believe the art’s larger than the artist. Who cares about John Steinbeck? I care about the Joad family.
I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.
I got a degree in sociology, didn’t read much fiction in college, and I was a pretty political, left-wing type of guy. I wanted to do some kind of work in social change and make things better for the poor man, and I was very romantic and passionate about it.
Don’t outline your stories. A lot of fiction workshops say you should. I say the opposite. I quote Grace Paley: “We write what we don’t know we know.”
Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June and, then after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak’s Broadway to Chicago.
That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.
I really think that if there’s any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it’s self-consciousness.