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.
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.
Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.
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.
What once were two, are one.
I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he’s made of sugar.
It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations. But I can look back at the way I thought and felt even as a little kid and there was a lot of wonder there, and openness to the many sides of life.
The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters to people are slim.
I have finally realized that, you know, it’s not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations.