I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.
I haven’t had writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly.
I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it’s afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it’s hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I’ll hopefully continue with that.
I felt more doubtful than usual with ‘Goon Squad,’ because I knew that the book’s genre wasn’t easily named – Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? – and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty modest.
Because you can’t write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That’s how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.
We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There’s simply no way to write well, though, if you’re not reading well.
The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that’s what gets me the best material.
That adage about ‘Write what you know’ is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I’m curious to find out.
If you don’t have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you’ve got nothing.
I’m a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.
I don’t really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That’s what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.
The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don’t listen to them – listen to me. And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.
Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn’t a myth belong to everyone?
Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.
This is the music business. ‘Five years is five hundred years’ – your words.
Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn’t stemmed the suspicion that people’s opinions weren’t really their own. “Who’s paying you?” was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughter – who would let themselves be bought?
I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I’m guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn’t there.
Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.
I had this idea that I could hire myself out as a person to go on archeological digs and dig, without any training! I actually wrote to a number of archeology departments and offered up my services.
When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it’s happened?