You really romanticize the white-trash period of your life,′ Rain once said to me, which I thought was a little hurtful but perhaps true.
The circumstances of life-the events of life-the people around me in life-do not make me the way I am. They reveal the way I am.
I should be arguing vehemently with doctors, demanding results, I should be surrounded by people who are bleeding and screaming and shocking one another with defibrillators.
The people who control this country are the real gangsters. You know that, right? And if you play by their rules, you’re nothing but their slave.
On the seat beside him, in between him and his father, Ryan’s severed hand is resting on a bed of ice in an eight-quart Styrofoam cooler.
Above the wrist? Or below the wrist?
There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything.
You can’t tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.
Fiction is fun because you get to steal an identity and try to make it authentic.
Identity issues are hardwired into the way I think about character – it’s almost as if I can’t get away from them even if I want to.
Here is the door of my mom’s house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.
Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.
I’ve never been able to sleep very much, even when I was a kid. I used to hate being forced to lay in bed in the darkness, and just shifting in bed and staring at the shadows.
A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn’t see.
I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.
Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it’s like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.
The feeling of being an outsider, and the identity theme, are hardwired into me. If there’s anything really autobiographical in my fiction, it’s that feeling. I always feel that way.
The happiest I have ever been is in the life that I led with my wife and kids.
If no one knows you, then you are no one.
I think we’re always in some ways writing to the teachers who gave us early love.