The word God asks a question and then answers it before there is any chance to wonder.
The level of control, that’s part of what’s so appealing about filmmaking – you have so much control over what the reader, the viewer, is noticing from moment to moment. They can’t do that boring boring boring thing as easily.
It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.
It was a tiny sound but it woke me up because it was a human sound.
He seemed to be waiting for me to move forward. Weren’t we all.
People tend to stick to their own size group because it’s easier on the neck. Unless they are romantically involved, in which case the size difference is sexy. It means: I am willing to go the distance for you.
The job of the artist is to point at things.
Inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed.
I’m interested in what the virtues of all those things are, especially for the kind of person who’s made their own world that revolves around them, like writers do. It seems especially precious.
For a split second I felt as though she was nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I blinked and was in love with her again.
We really wanted to know all the unknowable things about each other and how we were the same and how we were different, if we even were, maybe nobody is.
I knew the beginning and the end – I just had to dream up a convincing middle.
We had loved people we really shouldn’t have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.
An erratum is a correction inserted into a book after publication. It’s a nice thing to collect because you can’t go after them, you just come upon them. In 25 years I’ve only found about 12.
Live the dream, Potato.
When I write, I wear earplugs. I don’t want to be self-conscious. I don’t want to be thinking about the fact that I’m thinking about it. I just want to be in it. It’s one element of hypnosis.
I was going to die and it was taking forever.
Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost.
I like embracing kind of normal forms but am always trying to approach them as if no one’s ever done that before. As if I’m literally the first person to ever write a book.
If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?