The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it’s not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I’ve met, and think they’re incredibly witty, inventive – there’s a lot of poetry there.
Doesn’t Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?
If you feel you have a strong constituency among the young, you can really die happy, because the great unanswered question, the only valid value judgment is whether you’re going to last, and that tells you that you are, for a bit at least.
Oh man sometimes I wake up feel like a cat runover. Are you familiar with the stoical aspects of hard drinking, of heavy drinking? Oh it’s heavy. Oh it’s hard. It isn’t easy. Jesus, I never meant me any harm. All I wanted was a good time.
It’s without doubt my main subject. The way masculinity can go wrong. And I’m something of a gynocrat in a utopian kind of way.
When I see a lot of young faces in the audience, it’s just sort of sinking in how important that is. Because you’re old enough now to identify them very strongly as being young – whereas before, of course they were young, because you were young. Now it’s not like that.
Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.
I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they’re not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.
He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
My 12-year-old daughter said to me, “Enough with the subtitles, Daddy, for crying out loud.” Because they always seem to cloud the issue rather than clarify it.
It’s good fun to create an unpredictable character. When he comes into the room, I don’t know what he’s going to do – I have to find my way.
Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life.
You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.
Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.
In the concordance of Nicola Six’s kisses there were many subheads and subsections, many genres and phyla – chapter and verse, cross-references, multiple citations.
I can imagine in a century or two that rule by women will be seen as a better bet than rule by men. What’s wrong with men is that they tend to look for the violent solution. Women don’t.
I sometimes feel I’m a sort of cult writer, rather than a mainstream writer, in that those who like my stuff like it a lot, but the appeal is not that broad.
Addictions do come in handy sometimes: at least you have to get out of bed for them.
He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness.
When I talk about the pleasure principle, I don’t say there is only one kind of pleasure, there are many kinds of pleasure. Some pleasure is difficult. It should be for the reader as well as the writer. But it has to be pleasure.