A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy.
We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.
Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.
I’ve known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they’re ready to write, they can’t move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.
It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.
Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.
Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.
There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.
Satire’s nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.
We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.
The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don’t know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks.
Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.
My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.
Dad is always hiding in his book.
And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.
Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.
Uncharged with invisible meaning, the visible is nothing, mere clay; and without visible circumstance, a territory, to connect to, our spirit is shapeless, nameless, and undefined.