Most great writers suffer and have no idea how good they are. Most bad writers are very confident. Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver, the bat girl in Yankee Stadium. That’s a more fruitful way to be.
I’m doomed to act like myself, even when it’s inconvenient!
There’s a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that’s a perfect zero you can go into. There’s a rest point between the heart muscle’s close and open – an instant of keenest living when you’re momentarily dead. You can rest there.
I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I’d been publishing for 20 years.
There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.
The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.
How much smaller the large places are once we’re grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.
Memoir is not an act of history, but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
The truth is when I went to graduate school I would’ve said I was among the least talented of the students, I was certainly the least smart, or less educated. But I worked very hard.
People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.
The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.
If you lie to your husband – even about something so banal as how much you drink – each lie is a brick in a wall going up between you, and when he tells you he loves you, it’s deflected away.
I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.
It strikes me that whatever advantages there are to being a boy – getting to stay out late and having other people wash your clothes and bring you plates of stuff – get undercut by having to play football.
For me, everything’s too much and nothing’s enough.
I’d spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet – buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture – than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.
We are in the grip of some big machine grinding us along. The force of it simplifies everything. A weird calm settled over me from inside out. What is about to happen has stood in line to happen. All the roads out of that instant have been closed, one by one.
I don’t have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look.
Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn’t a healthy thing for me.