You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you’d be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.
I admire your capacity for admiring.
Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
Being dead’s only a problem if you know you’re dead, which you never do because you’re dead!
If you look at the New Testament, it’s a gospel of love. Yes, there’s talk of judgement and there’s talk of heaven and there’s talk of people not getting into heaven, but it doesn’t seem to me that the fundamental message of the gospels was one of guilt and retribution so much as love.
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.
He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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.