Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.
Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it’s not relating in prose what you’ve been doing for the last two or three years.
After a while you learn that everything stops.
Disintegration – I’m taking it in stride.
I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels.
Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is a crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.
You learn to move on without the people you love.
There’s no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.
I do tend to look at my books in many ways as conceptual fiction, even to the point where I think the author’s photograph is part of the package. And I have gone out of my way to select the photograph to connect to the subject matter of each book.
I don’t want to care. If I care about things, it’ll just be worse, it’ll just be another thing to worry about. It’s less painful if I don’t care.
Greed is good. Sex is easy. Youth is forever.
I’ve never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I’ve never touched upon my life. I’ve never written a single scene that I can say took place.
I needed something – the distraction of another life – to alleviate fear.
Why would I care what other people are thinking? I don’t care what an audience thinks of me.
Life is like a typographical error: we’re constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.
I think the ’80s created me, in a way, when I look back on that time, but I don’t necessarily think that a lot of my choices, and a lot of things that I did, and a lot of things that happened to me – or I let happen to me – were about that decade.
People are afraid to merge.
Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.
If you come at movies with your own sense of morality and not your own sense of aesthetics, I think you’re screwed. I think that’s not a way to look at movies.
Open the hood of a car and it will tell you something about the people who designed it, is just one of many phrases I’m tortured by.