I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
I often pose questions to myself and want the answers. The questions may be psychological or emotional. Or they may involve botany or physiology. I am very curious about strangers I observe – as in a bus line. I am very attached to finding out answers.
Art is not in some far-off place.
I can talk for a long time only when it’s about something boring.
So the question really is, Why doesn’t that pain make you say, I won’t do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don’t.
As the writer, I may choose to ignore the emotional heart of the matter, and focus on details, and trust that the heart of the matter will be conveyed nevertheless.
There is something very pleasing about the principles of science and the rules of math, because they are so inevitable and so harmonious – in the abstract, anyway.
No one is calling me. I can’t check the answering machine because I have been here all this time. If I go out, someone may call while I’m out. Then I can check the answering machine when I come back in.
I don’t believe a good poet is very often deliberately obscure. A poet writes in a way necessary to him or her; the reader may then find the poem difficult.
Work hard and meticulously. When in trouble, look closely at a text that is a good example of what you’re trying to do. And be patient.
I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught – not mixing metaphors, etc.
I’m a fierce editor! I don’t edit out things that I began by saying, usually. The editing is on the micro level – a comma here, a word there.
To be simple, I would say a story has to have a bit of narrative, if only “she says,” and then enough of a creation of a different time and place to transport the reader.
Under all this dirt the floor is really very clean.
This was why she could not sleep. She could not say the day was over. She had no sense that any day was ever over.
Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion – you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.
How strange it is to realize now that although I was frightened of the emptiness between us, that emptiness was not his fault but mine: I was waiting to see what he would give me, how he would entertain me. And yet I was incapable of being profoundly interested in him or, maybe, in anyone. Just the reverse of what I thought at the time, when it seemed so simple: he was too callow, or too cautious, or just too young, not complex enough yet, and so he did not entertain me, and it was his fault.
People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?
There are also men in the world. Sometimes we forget, and think there are only women – endless hills and plains of unresisting women. We make little jokes and comfort each other and our lives pass quickly. But every now and then, it is true, a man rises unexpectedly in our midst like a pine tree, and looks savagely at us, and sends us hobbling away in great floods to hide in the caves and gullies until he is gone.
His inconsistency. His inability to finish anything. His sudden terrifying feelings that nothing he did mattered. His realizations that what went on in the outside world had more substance than anything in his life.