Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.
I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365. So the pages accumulate and then I publish the books.
Because that is when you love somebody – when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.
The book really comes to life in the rewriting.
Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that – well, lucky you.
I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you – it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.
Dreams? If only they had been! But I don’t need dreams, Doctor, that’s why I hardly have them – because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight!
It’s best to give while your hand is still warm.
I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.
Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.
You tasted it. Isn’t that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That’s all we’re given in life, that’s all we’re given of life. A taste. There is no more.
Too late, but I understand. That we don’t perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that – of just that.
You be greater than your feelings. I don’t demand this of you – life does. Otherwise you’ll be washed away by feelings. You’ll be washed out to sea and never seen again.
Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
I’m an Obama supporter. And if you’re an Obama supporter that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.
Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.
I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
Each book starts from ashes really. I don’t feel that I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell or that story to tell, but I want to be occupied with the writing process while I’m living.
You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.
A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.