She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.
I think there’s a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.
Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It’s the thing that lets us say goodbye.
It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.
There was nowhere I could go that wouldn’t be you.
In the midst of my skeptical, cynical, often pessimistic nature exists a slender capacity to believe, if only temporarily, in a guiding, unseen power, and whenever this happens, I go with it. That’s what inspiration is. You don’t get it from the gods. You make it.
The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.
The ideas for my books come about in two ways. There can be an intellectual idea that seems to be the reason for writing the book. The other motive is unconscious. There is something deeply psychological and emotional that draws me to the material in the first place.
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.
When I’m creating a character, it’s a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you’re using sense memory to do a scene – if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears.
There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.
The time has to be right and the heart willing.
Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.
There’s a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I’m writing a character where I put myself in their place.
That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? “Tell me a story.” That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.
I’m constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.
Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.
But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.
Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.