There’s love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we’re alone in our heads.
Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.
Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.
As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice.
Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.
I don’t think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.
Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that’s because they don’t know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.
I never feel I’m standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.
You find the book in the process of doing it. That’s the adventure of the job.
I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It’s not natural to make art.
Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.
The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.
Every man is the author of his own life.
Most people just want to be part of the world, they want to live, love, and enjoy themselves – to take part in the world around them. Whereas artists are always retreating, locking the door, and inventing other worlds.
In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant.
Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.
I don’t want to use quotation marks anymore, I’ve gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn’t use them, for instance, all the way back in the early eighties.
We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man.