Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That’s why we have art.
Is there any mystery like who you finally turn out to be.
Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one’s elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one’s generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.
Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the ‘self’ see the ‘self’ with any objectivity?
When I’m really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it’s as though I’m writing a letter to someone I’m desperately in love with.
My writing is full of lives I might have led.
Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don’t want them. What I want is a voice.
Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.
The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you’ve done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well.
A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is to talk, to interrupt one another, and to devour each other if possible.
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.