Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.
All human states are organic brain states – happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels – and our brains are not static.
There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.
Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.
Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.
Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.
There’s a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
I’ve often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.
Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless.
That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.
Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit – unconscious and conscious.
Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.
Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.
Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.
Like countless first-year medical students, immersed in the symptoms of one disease after another, I am alert to the tingles and pangs, the throbs and quivers of my mortal body, each one of which is potentially a sign of the end.
Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer...
Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.
Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.
I don’t want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.