I think love and sex are separate and only vaguely similar. Like the word bear and the word bare. You can get in trouble mistaking one for the other.
I see all. I hear all. I know all. And I spend a great deal of time in the bathroom.
The real name for ‘science’ is magic.
The world is turning into a cesspool of imbeciles.
To say more, is to say less.
I was the green monkey, the pariah. And I had no friends. Not just a few friends, or one good friend, or grudging acceptance by other misfits and outcasts. I was alone. All stinking alone, without even an imaginary playmate.
They change scapegoats at the networks more regularly than some people change socks.
Thus, from admiration of one wise and innocent child, and from a misheard remark, the process that not even Aristotle could codify was triggered. Where do you get your ideas? I purposely mishear things.
Writing is a holy chore.
There in the midst of the Amazon Jungle, Simon Haskell has cobbled up for himself a replica of an Art Deco salon.
I hate being wrong, but I love it when I’m set straight.
When you’re a writer, you have to have the passion and the skill and the craft. It’s not just enough to have the passion. You’ve gotta have all three.
I never send a story off until I have read it aloud to at least two or three people. Because when I read – and I don’t need their criticism, what I need is my own – when I read it aloud, there is a flow, there is a poetry to it.
I am responsible for myself. I am exactly who I eventually wanted myself to be, I guess, without consciously knowing what I wanted me to be.
Any writer who pretends to a disaffection for recognition, I think they’re being duplicitous.
If you let the image of the messenger get in the way of whatever message there may be, however large or small, that’s your problem, not his.
I made as many mistakes as anybody else. I sound as if I’m an egomaniac, and I suppose in some ways I’m filled with hubris because I know how good I am at certain things. But other things, I can’t do at all. I can’t draw.
The act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you’re writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always means – the form follows function.
I am not one of these people who instantly takes umbrage when he’s corrected or – I love being corrected.
I don’t know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyeballs water.