And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.
When she went back to the telephone Hely’s breath, on the other end, was ragged and secretive.
Her eyes – lined with black makeup – stared blankly at the ceiling; and her tan was obviously sprayed on since her skin had a healthy apricot glow even though the top of her head was missing.
I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.
The books I loved in childhood – the first loves – I’ve read so often that I’ve internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.
Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there’s no need for secrecy.
It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
I’d always rather stand or fall on my own mistakes. There’s nothing worse than looking back, in a published book, at a line edit or a copy edit that you felt queasy about and didn’t want to take, but took anyway.
Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she’d wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she’d known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.
I’d been assured, at age 21 or so, by a well-known editor who saw the first part of The Secret History in what was basically its final form, that it would never be published because “no woman has ever written a successful novel from a male point of view.”
As much fun as it is to read a book, writing a book is one level deeper than that.
Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that’s a hard lesson of reality.
There’s nothing like having a sympathetic reader who asks the right questions, who understands what you’re trying to achieve and only wants to make it better.
Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
Criticism at the wrong time, even if it’s legitimate criticism, can be seriously damaging and make the writer lose faith in what he’s doing. It’s the timing that’s all-important.
I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
Even if you need, and want, a second opinion, it can be dangerous to have people telling you what they think you ought to add, or cut, before you’ve even finished telling your story. One loses heart; one loses energy and interest. Or at least I do.
It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
I’d rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.