I don’t know what I think until I write it down.
Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.
Something I’ve always known about the screen is that if it’s anything in the world, it’s literal. It’s so literal that there’s a whole lot you can’t do because you’re stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.
I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
When the ground starts moving, all bets are off.
I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It’s a way of going underwater. I’ve always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self, an impossible claim that one should be at once Rose Bowl princess, medieval scholar, Saint Joan, Milly Theale, Temple Drake, Eleanor of Aquitaine, one.
You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That’s really the most complicated part.
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.
A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.
I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
I can’t imagine writing if I didn’t have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
We all have the same dreams.
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
If you aren’t aware of the reader, you’re working in a vacuum.
I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.