Keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses – places where statements that seem to obey all the language’s rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.
I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.
I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I’d come to see as my co-conspirator.
Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
Kafka’s evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.
It was when I was the age where you can, as they say, “hear voices” without worrying that something is wrong with you. I “heard voices” all the time as a small child.
No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.
You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.
Do not underestimate objects.
I knew my limitations and the limitations of the courts I played on, and adjusted thusly. I was at my best in bad conditions.
At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum’s axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.
The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal.
I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. ‘Love’ is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.
But of course there are all kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.
There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.
TV’s “real” agenda is to be “liked,” because if you like what you’re seeing, you’ll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it’s its sole raison.
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.
The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.
Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.