Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
I’ve never been a fast reader. I’m fickle; I don’t finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.
I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same – keep what’s published in the form in which it appeared.
I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers-the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally reveals not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage points of passage.
I think I am done with Wikipedia for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue – a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren’t libelous or otherwise illegal.
Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.
Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, of these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain than in any other.
Most writers are secretly worried that they’re not really writers. That it’s all been happenstance, something came together randomly, the letters came together, and they won’t coalesce ever again.
The function of a great library is to store obscure books.
Sometimes, despite the fact that you’re reading through masses of material, you just can’t not think about a certain event, for it seems to capture the reality of the entire situation so much better than any set of statistics.
True, the name of the product wasn’t so great. Kindle? It was cute and sinister at the same time – worse than Edsel, or Probe, or Microsoft’s Bob. But one forgives a bad name. One even comes to be fond of a bad name, if the product itself is delightful.
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.