People are more than you think they are. And they’re less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.
I just don’t feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Sure, go ahead, simulate life, using only ink and paper.
I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.
It’s the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.
The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
I have no useful theories about love and marriage.
I think of the people who commit these acts as children. They’re in their 20s, but like certain children, they have been told only one story, over and over. Like most children, they believe in an easily identifiable good and evil, and like most children, they are capable of unthinkable cruelty.
Oh, all you immigrants and visionaries, what do you hope to find here, who do you hope to become?
Love is deep, a mystery – who wants to understand its every particular?
Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.
Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.
You grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore; because you dress unexceptionally.
Virginia Woolf’s great novel, ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.
Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things.
On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it’s differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I’m finishing, even if it’s turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don’t admit it, they’re not being honest.
I know, speaking for myself, no matter what I’m able to do, no matter what book comes out and ends up on paper, I always had something bigger and grander in my head.
I love movies, I love television, I love narratives of all kinds.
There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined.