But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.
For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.
For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.
Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.
Each book I’ve done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.
Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.
The things we remember are often things that have great emotional importance, and so they have a lasting effect.
Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination, where as you can watch a film-and even enjoy it-in a state of mindless passivity.
I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.
I think if we didn’t contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
As says who is deeply involved with neuroscience, emotion consolidates memory, and I think that’s true.
I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.
I’ve learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.
Money’s important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don’t have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.
I don’t have all the facts. And I might misremember. As a matter of fact, after I finished Winter Journal, I realized that I’d gotten someone’s name wrong.
What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.
To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books – this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one’s life becomes very small.
There’s a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog – and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! – in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.
As long as there’s one person to believe it, there’s no story that can’t be true.