The nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony.
Gandhi was important for another reason as well: his country was suffering under the British Empire, and yet he was leading a very singular kind of resistance to it. At the time he was speaking about the violence in Europe, his followers were in jail as prisoners of the British government.
The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I’m very polite in person. I don’t want to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.
One’s head is finite. You pour more and more things into it – surnames, chronologies, affiliations – and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish.
Maybe the Kindle was the Bowflex of bookishness: something expensive that, when you commit to it, forces you to do more of whatever it is you think you should be doing more of.
I’m often called obsessive, but I don’t think I am any more than anyone else.
I don’t do all that well in the writerly world. I’m happier being outside the flow.
There is no good word for stomach; just as there is no good word for girlfriend. Stomach is to girlfriend as belly is to lover, and as abdomen is to consort, and as middle is to petite amie.
I’m suspicious of full-replacement programs – that is, pronouncements that one way of doing something will entirely supplant another, and that in fact we have to hurry the replacement along.
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.