Chekhov – shall I be blunt? – is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery.
In fact unrestrained capitalism is quite cruel and the cost is on the individual human, on his or her grace.
Success is like a mountain in front of you that keeps growing. If you’re not careful, it will take up your whole life.
If you want to explore a political idea in the highest possible way, you embody it in the personal, because that’s something that no one can deny.
I was a straight arrow, a control freak. I didn’t do drugs or drink, and this was the ’70s. I didn’t like the loss of control. Which isn’t exactly right, because I didn’t know what happened when you did drugs.
I was a big and un-ironic fan of Dear Abby when I was a kid in Chicago. I think I sort of internalized her. So I have this inner Abby: cranky, proper, folksy yet scathing, with a beehive hairdo. But that’s my issue.
I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I’ve done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.
I often think about image, and image is something that – but in truth, the real artistic process, as I’ve understood it, is 95 percent intuitive, like seat-of-the-pants, at-the-moment decisions that you can’t even explain, you know?
A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.
Twitter is a deliberate abstention. Somehow I hate the idea of there always being, in the back of my mind, this little voice saying: ‘Oh, I should tweet about this.’
Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort – and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.
Whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it – every word has a big question mark over it.
That’s what a story must feel like to me. It’s not, “I want to write about a gravedigger.” But you’re walking along and – boop! shovel. “Ok, what does one do with a shovel? Digs a hole. Why? I don’t know yet. Dig the hole! Oh, look a body.”
The most hopeful thing in the stories, I hope, is wit. I make it up. If I make up a world in which we’re ruled by big talking turds, it doesn’t mean that we are. So you shouldn’t feel depressed...
I love the feeling of being on the hunt – the feeling that the story is refusing to be solved in some lesser way and is insisting that you see it on its highest terms.
I’m not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I’m just trusting that, if I’m working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.
Positive human action is not only possible, but pervasive; human beings can improve and choose light and so on. And this is all happening.
I’m not a big fan of my books going on cross-country road trips. They get arrogant and, next thing, start aspiring to become ‘large-print’ books. I say, let them stay home and be regular small-print books.
Fiction is open to whoever comes in the door, as long as you come in energetically.
Whatever you love, that will be an influence. It just will. So in effect the young writer’s job is: go out and find some stuff to love.