In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved.
Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.
It’s very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have a different reputation – but, then I couldn’t be myself either.
The quiet people just do their work.
I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.
We are the species that clamors to be lied to.
As a teacher at Princeton, I’m surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don’t really think of it as work – writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.
Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?
The punishment – to the body, the brain, the spirit – a man must endure to become even a moderately good boxer is inconceivable to most of us whose idea of personal risk is largely ego-related or emotional.
Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.
Boxing is rough. Even if you win, you get hurt.
A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.
Self-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practice.
I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I’ve written.
I really love to set things in places that are real to me.
It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.
Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.
Can compromise be an art? Yes – but a minor art.
I think whenever we think of our hometowns, we tend to think of very specific people: with whom you rode on the school bus, who was your next door neighbor you were playing with, who your girlfriend was. It’s always something very specific.
Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or feels no ambivalence about my mother. All my feelings for my mother were positive, very strong and abiding.