Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.
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.
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?’