Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you’re no longer their child.
Writing is the most solitary of arts.
Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book, and go about trying to buy up all existing copies.
Not even the most devastating truth can be told; it must be evoked.
Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light.
Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.
Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields – and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible.
There are boxers possessed of such remarkable intuition, such uncanny prescience, one would think they were somehow recalling their fights, not fighting them as we watch.
Before I undertake a lengthy project, I have usually given much thought to it over a period of years. My files are filled with likely subjects – which perhaps, one day, I will develop.
Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man’s body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don’t don’t don’t don’t leave me. DON’T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.
I’m drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.
The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one’s generosity? Why regret one’s impulsiveness, one’s misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you’d written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don’t cherish us as we’d cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them.
You love the life you’ve lived because it is yours.
That glass sliver in the heart. Amid a fluttery-delicious Benzedrine rush, virtually every remark made to you is freighted with destiny, a sweet-painful stab in the heart. And Benzedrine and champagne, what a combination! The Blond Actress was only just discovering what everybody else in Hollywood knew.
Katya laughed and shrugged. She was a hired girl; she said such things on order. Much of her life was this sort of semiskilled playing to other people, usually older people, with the hope of making them like her; making them feel that she was valuable to them; wresting some of their power from them, if but fleetingly. It was like provoking a boy or a man to want you. That could be risky, as Katya well knew.
The challenge is, to live in a house from which meaning has departed, like air leaking from a balloon. A slow leak, yet lethal. And one day, the balloon is flat: it is not a balloon any longer. By.
Messes are made by people who want but don’t know what they want, let alone how to get it.
I am thinking of having a T-shirt printed: Yes my husband died. Yes I am very sad. Yes you are kind to offer condolences. Now can we change the subject?
Relief is happiness for those who, otherwise, would have no happiness.
Words are like wild birds – they will come when they wish, not when they are bidden.