Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.
For me, nostalgia is an involuntary emotion. I think it’s just a natural human response to loss.
Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.
All the preparation in the world doesn’t avail you if you can’t make that imaginative leap and put yourself in the position of the characters you’ve created, to imagine what it’s like to be somebody else.
I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.
The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.
I have a deadline. I’m glad. I think that will help me get it done.
I have a good memory for words, and when I come upon a word I don’t know, I remember it, or try to – it’s almost like a tic.
Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses!
All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.
Not only would I never want to belong to any club that would have me for a member – if elected I would wear street shoes onto the squash court and set fire to the ballroom curtains.
I don’t do a lot of foisting, because when it comes to books I don’t really like to be foisted upon.
They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other.
When I finish a first draft, it’s always just as much of a mess as it’s always been. I still make the same mistakes every time.
You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.
Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.
I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image.
I’m never going to be a Tom Clancy. And I wouldn’t really want to be – not that I have anything against him, and I wish him continued success – because that’s not why I’m writing novels. I’m doing it because I have to. I feel like I have to, anyway.
He was a fugitive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn’t belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged.
Every Messiah fails, the moment he tries to redeem himself.