Was there ever in anyone’s life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
Writers are always selling somebody out.
You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.
Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
I’m totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.
Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
Novels are almost like music or poetry – they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I’ve started using a computer.
The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities.
The ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.
I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won’t be able to write anymore, so I thought I’d go back to the typewriter. But you couldn’t go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
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.