I’ll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you’re trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.
I’m never, I hope, stupid enough to believe that Twitter or blogging or any of this stuff is a substitute for actually doing the work or writing a book.
In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.
It’s a given that we exist in a world where we have to live in continuity every day; no one is immune to that, in life or romance novels. By the same token, it’s not something I find terribly important.
My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him.
My theory on genre is that while there are people out there who believe that genre tells people what to read, actually I believe that genre exists as a marketing tool to tell you what to avoid.
Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.
So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.
There’s a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up – or didn’t – and Jamaican stories.
However you must have sensed a lurking ‘but’ skulking beneath my happy, blithe, and chipper exterior. A minuscule vexation, like the teeniest lump of raw liver sticking to the inside of my boot.
I am selfish, private and easily bored. Will this be a problem?
Have you ever spent days and days and days making up flavors of ice cream that no one’s ever eaten before? Like chicken and telepone ice cream? Green mouse ice cream was the worst. I didn’t like that at all.
Never a possession, always the possessor, with skin as pale as smoke, and eyes tawny and sharp as yellow wine: Desire is everything you’ve ever wanted. Whoever you are. Whatever you are. Everything.
You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
And then he’d tried to become an official Atheist and hadn’t got the rock-hard self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.
Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled but halved. No man is an island.
It’s not sipping wine. It’s a mourning wine. You drain it. Like this.
Names come and names go.
You don’t have to test everything to destruction just to see if you made it right.
All around me darkness gathers, Fading is the sun that shone, We must speak of other matters, You can be me when I’m gone Flowers gathered in the morning, Afternoon they blossom on, Still are withered in the evening, You can be me when I’m gone.