Fiction is always a utopian task, in that there’s an ideal you hold in your head as you write which inevitably fails in the moment of creation, in the insufficiency of words to convey meaning, or in the way the work is completed in the reader’s head.
It’s wonderful that nothing you write is ever going to be as beautiful as what’s in your head, because that gap is where the art can enter and begin to stretch its limbs.
I won’t walk under scaffolding or under ladders. I wear things like a baseball player wears things that are supposed to have luck. I am superstitious about everything.
We need the skeletons of other stories to understand our own, sometimes.
I see ghosts everywhere, and that is partially a function of my being incredibly near-sighted and reading way too late into the night.
I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.
I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.
Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.
It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you’d find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual.
You had to pick up a landline to make sure your best friend wore a matching outfit to school. I do remember people talking more. Nostalgia is dangerous, though.
I’m always hungry for people.
I love Twitter. It’s like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you’re tired of them.
In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they’re living for the length of a book inside another person.
While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That’s more than connecting.
Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.
Paradox of marriage: you can never know someone entirely; you do know someone entirely.
Please. Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste. She never lied. Just never said.
Because it’s true: more than the highlights, the bright events, it was in the small and the daily where she’d found life.
Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.
They had been married for seventeen years; she lived in the deepest room in his heart. And sometimes that meant that wife occurred to him before Mathilde, helpmeet before herself. Abstraction of her before the visceral being. But not now. When she came across the veranda, he saw Mathilde all of a sudden. The dark whip at the center of her. How, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning.