Is any novelist going to recognize the moment when he or she has nothing more to say? It is a brave thing to admit. And since as a professional writer you are full of anxiety anyway, you could easily misread the signs.
How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.
The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
But life never lets you go, does it? You can’t put down life the way you put down a book.
In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.
I’m a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.
A couple’s first task, it has always seemed to me, is to solve the problem of breakfast; if this can be worked out amicably, most other difficulties can too.
Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?
Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.
Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.
I’m a novelist, so I can’t write about ideas unless they’re attached to people.
It’s easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren’t writers, and very little harm comes to them.
Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.
History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.