Farts come from no one and nowhere; they are anonymous emanations that belong to the group as a whole, and even when every person in the room can point to the culprit, the only sane course of action is denial.
I don’t think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.
The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
I don’t know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn’t have to. But it is a compulsion. You don’t choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody.
Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it.
It’s like a mathematical law, Grace.
I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.
In the old physics, three times two equals six and two times three equals 6 are reversible propositions. Not in quantum physics. Three times two and two times three are two different matters, distinct and separate propositions.
I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.
Let me tell you, there’s no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.
When I am writing, even though it’s hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I’m not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I’m not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic.
Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or as Leibniz put it: ‘Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe’
I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.
History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.
How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesnt believe that, about other possibilities?
Guilt kept me going. It was impossible not to blame myself for what had happened, but even guilt was a comfort. It was a human feeling, a sign that I was still attached to the same world that other men lived in.
The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry – actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.
If the world weren’t such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics.
What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?
There are certain phrases in books of mine, and I don’t know where they came from, or how I was capable of thinking up these formulations. It’s only in the heat of composition that these things occur to you.