Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult – in any way – something in your childhood dies.
My brain is sending poison to my heart.
Being wrong about important things is exhausting.
Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
You don’t want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
I always know more about the ending, even the aftermath to the ending, than I know about the beginning. And so there’s a construction that works from back to front.
I don’t begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story – better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you’re capable of making it.
I’m a worst-case scenario person. I’m only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.
I’m not proselytizing my method. I don’t believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.
Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else’s version of themselves – to anyone else’s version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!
What do Americans know about morality? They don’t want their presidents to have penises but they don’t mind if their presidents covertly arrange to support the Nicaraguan rebel forces after Congress has restricted such aid; they don’t want their presidents to deceive their wives but they don’t mind if their presidents deceive Congress- lie to the people and violate the people’s constitution!
It seems to me that people who don’t learn as easily as others suffer from a kind of learning disability – there is something different about the way they comprehend unfamiliar material – but I fail to see how this disability is improved by psychiatric consultation. What seems to be lacking is a technical ability that those of us called ‘good students’ are born with. Someone should concretely study these skills and teach them. What does a shrink have to do with the process?
Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick-of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.
There comes a moment in every life when you must let go with your hands – with both hands.
Women know when men don’t desire them: ghosts and witches, deities and demons, angels of death – even virgins, even ordinary women. They always know; women can tell when you have stopped desiring them.
When people die, Vargas – I mean the people you will always remember, the ones who changed your life – they never really go away,” Pepe told the young doctor.
As for Jenny, she felt only that women – just like men – should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.
The day women stop reading – that’s the day the novel dies!