When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
Poetry is prose in slow motion.
You need the art in order to love the life.
You can tell it’s a poem because it’s swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it’s a poem.
A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside.
It’s true that I don’t rearrange that much in the fiction, but I feel if you change even one name or the order of one event then you have to call it fiction or you get all the credits of non-fiction without paying the price.
In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I’m trying to get at more efficiently.
In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark.
Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.
As soon as you start doing that – changing things – it seems self-evident to me that you’ve entered the world of make-believe. If you pretend that it’s true, and use your own name, you are misleading people. Fiction is looser and wilder and sometimes in the end more self-revealing, anyway.
I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.
First, if you love the Kindle and it works for you, it isn’t problematic, and you should ignore all my criticisms and read the way you want to read.
Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until you’ve watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you.
Sometimes I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and I’d be turned into a mist and I would rematerialize in the room of the person I’m talking to. Is that too odd for you?
The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?
If you write every day, you’re going to write a lot of things that aren’t terribly good, but you’re going to have given things a chance to have their moments of sprouting.
You almost believe that you will never come to the end of a roll of tape; and when you do, there is a feeling, nearly, though very briefly, of shock and grief.
I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one.