When I was a kid, I took ‘The Brady Bunch’ and ‘The Partridge Family’ very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus.
I think that’s one of the maybe under-discussed aspects of process – the difference between a good writing day and a bad one is the quality of the split-second decisions you made.
If you at least try to do the things that excite you, it will make you a more expansive and present person – you’ll feel, at the end of your life, that at least you took the shot.
I’m very happy – if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I’m thrilled.
My heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.
Stay alert. The big moral crossroads in your life may not come labeled as such.
The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery.
In fact unrestrained capitalism is quite cruel and the cost is on the individual human, on his or her grace.
Success is like a mountain in front of you that keeps growing. If you’re not careful, it will take up your whole life.
If you want to explore a political idea in the highest possible way, you embody it in the personal, because that’s something that no one can deny.
I was a straight arrow, a control freak. I didn’t do drugs or drink, and this was the ’70s. I didn’t like the loss of control. Which isn’t exactly right, because I didn’t know what happened when you did drugs.
I was a big and un-ironic fan of Dear Abby when I was a kid in Chicago. I think I sort of internalized her. So I have this inner Abby: cranky, proper, folksy yet scathing, with a beehive hairdo. But that’s my issue.
I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I’ve done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.
I often think about image, and image is something that – but in truth, the real artistic process, as I’ve understood it, is 95 percent intuitive, like seat-of-the-pants, at-the-moment decisions that you can’t even explain, you know?
A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.
Twitter is a deliberate abstention. Somehow I hate the idea of there always being, in the back of my mind, this little voice saying: ‘Oh, I should tweet about this.’
Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort – and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.
Whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it – every word has a big question mark over it.
That’s what a story must feel like to me. It’s not, “I want to write about a gravedigger.” But you’re walking along and – boop! shovel. “Ok, what does one do with a shovel? Digs a hole. Why? I don’t know yet. Dig the hole! Oh, look a body.”
I love the feeling of being on the hunt – the feeling that the story is refusing to be solved in some lesser way and is insisting that you see it on its highest terms.