Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.
Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.
When ‘The Awakening’ was published it was considered so scandalous it was banned in the author’s home-town library, and she herself was barred from the Fine Arts Club in the same city. What the novel has to offer, among other things, is honesty.
Like most of the educated, I do harbor a fondness for the sins of my ignorant past.
The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.
A novelist has two lives – a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.
I was asked by an editor to consider writing something about an American inventor. I asked him if he knew who invented the computer. He said he didn’t. In that case, I told him, I should write a book about John Vincent Atanasoff.
I have reared, or helped to rear, five children and the scariest bit, bar none, is the learning-to-drive part. It has filled me with anxiety not only about the children, but also about my former self and my friends.
We sort of read two or three big newspapers but we don’t get the flavor of the local events, the local news as much.
There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.
People are quite frequently eccentric.
Many said that now there was no hope of salvation, for a man might do anything and be in the wrong. There was no way to tell. It was better to stay on the steading and mind the cows and be content with such days as are left to one and cease to wonder about life everlasting.
One of the things that Ivar knew about Mrs. Walker was that she would only tell him what she knew if he asked the right question, so he spent a portion of his time meditating over what he might ask Mrs. Walker and how he might phrase the question.
Respect and fear are two different things.
My mom was paranoid about my safety.
The thing about Republicans is that they don’t care so much about respect, but they love fear, at least in others.
Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.
Well, in fact everybody – everybody – in the entire nation has enough stuff in their life to write about that’s interesting that they could write their autobiography. And in the end that’s why I find people interesting.
When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud – 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?
Whatever you love is beautiful; love comes first, beauty follows. The greater your capacity for love, the more beauty you find in the world.