I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn’t write again until I was a senior in college.
How easy I was. Like a limpet I attached myself to anything, anyone who showed me the least attention.
I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don’t even know what’s going on with me until I’m writing. That doesn’t mean my books are autobiographical.
I think that Oprah’s on a mission to improve the lives of the average American in various ways. And one of them is to bring literature to people who would normally not be quite as demanding in their reading tastes, to show them writing that can be more than just entertainment.
The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box.
My house is modern, but I like my writing room to be old fashioned. I write on a little wooden secretary desk.
Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.
The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.
We parked in back and walked down the stairs with their polished brass railings, past the old-fashioned kitchen. We could see the chefs cooking. It smelled like stew, or meat loaf, the way time should smell, solid and nourishing.
You can’t shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don’t know.
Never apologize. Never explain.
This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment only to be washed away.
I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, men who made you love them then changed their minds.
Let me tell you a few things about regret. There is no end to it. Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?
Beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.
A couple of times, I could have turned a trick. But I didn’t want to start. I knew how it would play. When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.
Many women get involved with a man that you pretty much know isn’t suitable and you’re kind of breaking your rules, but he’s attractive in some unknown way. And then he doesn’t even realize what a sacrifice you’re making by being with him and he dumps you!
To make films, you have to have boundless energy; you have to work and play with others really, really well, and I’m really a more contemplative kind of person. I like to sit at home and think, a lot.
We don’t have a unitary society anymore, you know; it’s very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house.
When you’re a little kid, you are small, your life is small – and you’re terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.