Edith Wharton did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty.
I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.
The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
I don’t personally like the e-readers they’ve come up with so far. I don’t fetishize books, but I do like that they’re solid and unchanging.
You’re either reading a book or you’re not.
Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.
I think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media.
Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
There’s a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else’s work in the morning; it’s as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.
There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it’s the right unhappiness.
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn’t covetous, he wasn’t envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
I’m not too concerned what happens to my books after I’m dead. But I am very concerned by what’s going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.