The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.
The genius of women has always been easy to discount, suppress, or attribute to the nearest man. When.
I’ve always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification.
Fiction is not an escape from the world either. Imaginary experience is also experience. O.
I had left small-town, rural life for good, and I had no intention of ever returning, not because I didn’t like my home but because I had always known that I would leave. Leaving was part of my life romance, part of an idea I had about myself as a person destined for adventure; and as far as I could tell, adventure lay in the urban wilds of Manhattan, not in the farmland of Minnesota.
I suppose we are all products of our parents’ joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes.
Forgetting,” I said, “is probably as much a part of life as remembering. We’re all amnesiacs.
It has taken me a very long time, a very long time to give myself permission to fly and breathe fire.
Do you remember when you told me I had beautiful knees? I never like my knees. In fact, I thought they were ugly. But your eyes have rehabilitated them. Whether I see you again or not, I’m going to live out my life with these two beautiful knees.
New York City is the place where people come to invent, reinvent, or find the room they need to be who they wish to be.
The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer’s perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at.
I had read my way not to knowledge but into an inscrutable oblivion.
The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men.
No one rejoices more in revenge than women, wrote Juvenal. Women do most delight in revenge, wrote Sir Thomas Browne. Sweet is revenge, especially to women, wrote Lord Byron. And I say, I wonder why, boys. I wonder why.
Sometimes even now I think I see him in the street or standing in a window or bent over a book in a coffee shop. And in that instant, before I understand that it’s someone else, my lungs tighten and I lose my breath.
Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us – flesh and bone – only to be spewed out again in our own works.
I don’t know why you are better and more beautiful than anybody else.
I was afraid of it, because I liked it. It excited me.
Aggressive questions are usually pedagogic – that is, the answer has already been written in the mind of the questioner, who then waits with a reply. It’s pretend listening.
It’s odd the way life works, the way it mutates and wanders, the way one thing becomes another.