I think, especially when you’re in college, each book that you’re reading tends to tell you who you are.
No matter how long your’ve been at it, you always start from scratch.
They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn’t help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us.
Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities.
I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I’m writing about women, I think I’m writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.
What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.
I’d like to show how ‘intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members’ connects with ’the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.
I’m not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.
Some Pulitzer winners – novelists – have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn’t been my experience.
I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.
A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.
I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.
I’d like to have a word for ‘the sadness inspired by failing restaurants’ as well as for ’the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.
At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.
If you grew up in a house where you weren’t loved, you didn’t know there was an alternative.
Usually my ideas are small.
The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it’s a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.
One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.
Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it’s a character that’s very different from you.