Getting your foot in the door with some publishing people can be important when you’re starting out as a writer, but it’s also not enough to get you where you need to be.
Tall people have a real advantage in the world.
Every dude in your high school wasn’t striving to be the best poet because then he’d get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.
It’s very hard right now to be a pro sports fan. The economics of this stuff is abysmal.
I play American football every Saturday, which I find calming.
The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.
Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars.
For many years I didn’t have health insurance.
You are skilled. I exhort you.
Other things awaited. It was good to be young and to know it for once. So much unfolding to do.
I tended to write the book in these bursts of two or three months at a time. So I would know, or at least feel securely, that for the next few months I was at least going to have a few hours a day.
I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don’t make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves – people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.
But people didn’t forgive you for doing what felt right-that was the last thing they forgave you for.
There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.
In fact, theres a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted.
There are things you do when you’re writing that are so fun to do it’s almost like they’re private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you’re going to have to take them out in the end.
Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he’s wrong.
It was strange the way he loved her; a side long and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention.
For me, the process always has to be pretty intense. I could never write just two or three days a week. It had to be every day.
To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.