Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.
And what’s the point of waking up in the morning if you don’t try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?
In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes.
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.
I’ve got death inside me. It’s just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.
Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.
The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.
Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.
We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.
If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don’t know. It’s what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.
A writer decides to follow some ideas and not others for reasons that aren’t always clear to him. It’s often a matter of intuition.
It’s my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I’ve written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don’t know.
Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.
If an idea seems to find its way towards a stage setting, that’s the direction I take. I don’t know if I’m trying to achieve anything other than to follow an idea on to the page.
Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.
Longing on a large scale makes history.
I’m not reclusive at all. Just private.
There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense.