You do it a day at a time. You just put your rejection slips in a shoebox and tell yourself one day you’re going to autograph them and sell them at auction.
Write for the love of your art. Someplace down the road, the money, the fame, they’ll come, but by that time you won’t be thinking in terms of money or fame.
You have two choices in life. You either die or do something with your time. You’re going to be doing something – why not write?
Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.
I believe every... man remembers the girl he thinks he should have married. She reappears to him in his lonely moments, or he sees her in the face of a young girl in the park, buying a snowball under an oak tree by the baseball diamond. But she belongs to back there, to somebody else, and that thought sometimes rends your heart in a way that you never share with anyone else.
The wrong people always worry. The people who are the real problem never worry about anything.
All drunks, particularly those who grew up in alcoholic homes, have that same sense of angst and trepidation, one that has no explainable origins. The fear is not necessarily self-centered, either. It’s like watching someone point a revolver at his temple while he cocks and dry-fires the mechanism, over and over again, until the cylinder rotates a loaded chamber into firing position.
No matter what occurs in your life, no matter how bad the circumstances seem to be, you must never consider a dishonorable act as a viable alternative.
In a badass, beer-glass brawl, would you rather have an academic liberal covering your back or a hobnailed redneck?
No matter what the other side does to you, you grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives them crazy.
People were not what they said. They were not what they thought. They were not what they promised. People were what they did. When the final tally was done, nothing else mattered.
And I suppose that what I have learned is a lesson that the years, or self-concern, had begun to hide from me, namely, that the bravest and most loyal and loving people in the world seldom have heroic physical characteristics or the auras of saints. In fact, their faces are like those of people whom you might randomly pull out of a supermarket line, their physical makeup so nondescript and unremarkable that it’s hard to remember what they look like ten minutes after they walk out of a room.
My experience has been that grief and loss do not necessarily become more acceptable with time, and commitment to them is of no value to either the living or the dead.
As I was to learn, patience and latitude and even humility are, paradoxically, the handmaidens of wealth, because virtue is costly only for those who own nothing else.
Mortality is not kind, and do not let anyone tell you it is. If there is such a thing as wisdom, and I have serious doubts about its presence in my own life, it lies in the acceptance of the human condition and perhaps the knowledge that those who have passed on are still with us, out there in the mist, showing us the way, sometimes uttering a word of caution from the shadows, sometimes visiting us in our sleep, as bright as a candle burning inside a basement that has no windows.
Coincidence is your Higher Power acting with anonymity.
This is Louisiana, Dave. Guatemala North. Quit pretending it’s the United States. Life will make a lot more sense,” he said.
If you have attended the dying, you know what their last moments are like. They anticipate the separation of themselves from the world of the living before you do, and they accept it with dignity and without complaint.
Somehow sleep allows us to see clearly those very things that are obscured by the light of day.
We all have an extended family, people whom we recognize as our own as soon as we see them.