Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.
That seems to be the definition of ‘novel’ for me: a story that hasn’t yet discovered a way to be brief.
I was trained in seismic prospecting. We’d drill a deep hole and put dynamite in the bottom and blow it up remotely, which would give you a cross-sectional picture of the subsurface, which tells you where to drill.
The word ‘funny’ is a bit like the word ‘love’ – we don’t have enough words to describe the many varieties.
It seems to me that there are certain thoughts and vignettes and attitudes that I have always had the desire to represent.
Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.
If you haven’t read you don’t have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience.
There might be a different model for a literary community that’s quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity.
I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.
We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate – and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.
Chekhov – shall I be blunt? – is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
Back in 1992, I had my first story accepted by ‘The New Yorker.’
Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.
Nostalgia is, ‘Hey, remember the other mall that used to be there?’
When I write I know that I’m going to have to produce 40 percent more than I need.
That for me was the big turning point in my artistic life, when my wife and I had our kids. The world got infused with morality again. Every person in the world should theoretically be loved as much as I love my daughters.
This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and watch which way the traffic flows. Add impediments, the traffic endeavors to flow around them. Eilimate disparity. the traffic stops.
A culture’s ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.
At times, they’re so Right and I’m so Left, we agree.
I grew up in Chicago on the South Side, and had a ton of freedom, just did whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. At the risk of sounding dopey, I would say it was blissful.