The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.
As with all forms of liberation, of which the liberation of women is only one example, it is easy to suppose in a time of freedom that the darker days of repression can never come again.
Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.
When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people’s weirdness in that way.
Today’s Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I’m doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.
You see more sitting still than chasing after.
I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her.
I’ve moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don’t want these particular species to disappear.
Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.
I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them.
It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.
Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance.
Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society – to help solve our contemporary problems – seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn’t this enough? Isn’t it a lot?
The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
The world was ending then, it’s ending still, and I’m happy to belong to it again.
Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.
If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody’s perfect.