Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.
The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.
Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
I really enjoy doing both, but I didn’t write nonfiction until 1994.
It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.
To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.
The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.
Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.
It’s just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence – the drama of being her – was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.
I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn’t always agreeable or attractive.
Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds.
I can’t stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don’t believe that everything that’s wrong with the world has a cure.
It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value...
And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?
It’s healthy to say uncle when your bone’s about to break.
Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.