The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.
Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.
Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.
It’s very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.
Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it’s not science, it’s an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.
Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is.
Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.
I was a coward. I went to the war.
And as a writer now, I want to save Linda’s life. Not her body – her life.
But in a story I can steal her soul.
But this too is true: stories can save us.
My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.
Once someone’s dead you can’t make them undead.
We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.
There is always the threat of tomorrow’s treachery, or next year’s treachery, or the treachery implicit in all the tomorrows beyond that.
Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.
What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you’re leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?
Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste.
Imagination, like reality, has its limits.
There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.