My stories, I can understand them as a little toy that you wind up and you put it on the floor and it just goes under the coach. That I get. Beyond that, I’m a little lost.
Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.
If I’m writing a story and you’re reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process.
I think even like Saddam Hussein or Hitler would wake up and say, “I think it’s going to be a good day. I’m gonna do some really important work.” And given their definition of good, they went out and did horrible things.
I think the trick of being a writer is to basically put your cards out there all the time and be willing to be as in the dark about what happens next as your reader would be at that time.
The writer, in order to proceed, is theoretically trying to predict where his complex skein of language and image has left his reader, who he has likely never met and who is actually thousands of readers.
It’s a big world, and I really like it.
My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you’ve spent your day.
I’m comfortable with anything after the fact.
Err in the direction of kindness.
So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.
Character is that sum total of moments we can’t explain.
The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to the years during which the couple living in that house enjoyed true happiness.
The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present.
It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.
I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “Yuck, yuck, yuck, I’m gonna be evil.”
Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.
Every writer knows that when you’re imitating somebody – you know, you’re sounding like Faulkner – you’re doing pretty good, but your life in Hoboken isn’t Faulkneresque.
Goodbye. I am leaving because I am bored.
I read Rand and thought, “I want to be one of the earth movers, the scientific people who power the world. I don’t want to be one of these lisping liberal artsy leeches.” So I was working against my actual abilities.