I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.
Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.
He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.
Integrity’s a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They’re pure hyena.
This wasn’t the person he’d thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he’d been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
Deploring other people – their lack of perfection – had always been our sport.
He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn’t the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn’t get along well with others.
The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.
You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction-no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy’s disgust.
An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.
I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.
When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a ‘good writer.’ Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn’t mean I always write well.
Popularity has become its own justification.
And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.
The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?
It’sthe fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.
Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.
I hate that word dysfunction.