If I’m going to feel estranged and alienated and away from home I don’t want anyone interrupting it to debate which berries to have in their pancakes.
I don’t know exactly how long the book as we know it will exist, but I fully expect to make it to my death without having to give up on books.
There’s something really rich and powerful in not talking about what you need to talk about sometimes.
God howls with laughter at earthly plans, you know?
I love comic books and always did as a kid.
Maybe when I’m sixty-five I’ll talk about my literary life.
But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.
I have admired Melissa Pritchard’s writing for several years now for its wisdom, its humble elegance, and its earthy comedy.
I made this list of stuff that it’s time for me to try to do.
I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I’m trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.
It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I’d have the details all wrong or I couldn’t remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be.
I am a better writer for having fewer demons, and I am more curious about the world and the people in it. So those of you thinking you might need your demons in order to be creative: I beg to differ.
I do think that just about whenever I am writing, or more accurately, whenever I have written, I feel better and more at peace as a human being. That doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that the literary product is any good.
Tangled in one another’s arms and nine times out of ten the things you think about a person make it impossible to touch them.
Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.
I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order.
I think first-person narrators should be complex, because otherwise the first-person is too shallow and predictable. I like a first-person narrator who can’t totally be trusted.
So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it’s also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.
I’m trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.
My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.