Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I’m too afraid to and have to eat it anyway.
No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected – you write about it after it’s over.
Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.
All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father’s peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on ’defamatory.
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.
The argument, now, is about whether Bolshevik Russia was ‘better’ than Nazi Germany. In the days when the New Left dawned, the argument was about whether Bolshevik Russia was better than America.
Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
I think a lot of people who read fiction are interested in subtlety. But they wouldn’t like my stuff. It’s a bit too violent for many tastes.
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.