The last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up.
One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they’re crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don’t make sense.
Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
I don’t lead a writer’s life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
I was in love with New York. I do not mean ‘love’ in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.
Nonfiction is more personal for me. It’s more personal in that it’s more direct, and actually it’s always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible.
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
Before I’d written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers – when you’ve got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people’s ability to do that.
The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.
Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won’t go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
I hadn’t thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
In the early years, you fight because you don’t understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.
Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.
Writing is the act of saying “I,” of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying “listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.”
I lead a very conventional life.
To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.