That’s writing, I suppose – dozens of decisions about what’s in, what’s out, what goes with what, what’s clever but not honest, what’s so honest that it’s a truism, what’s meretricious – and all just to produce one short sketch.
Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction.
I’m not a great deep political thinker.
I’m from a time and place where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you’d get cut down for it by your peers and parents.
I’m a novelist, that’s how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.
I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so.
A weapon men use against women is the refusal to take them seriously.
Reality is the page. Life is the word.
Any society’s upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d’you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts.
I pass through many Me’s in the course of my day, each one selfish with his time. The Lying-in-Bed me and the Enjoying-the-Hot-Shower Me are particularly selfish. The Late Me loathes the pair of them.
Anticipating the end of the world is humanity’s oldest passtime.
Perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility.
It’s true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.
War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it’s a lottery.
It’s a small world. It keeps recrossing itself.
The healthy can’t understand the emptied, the broken.
So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?
If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.
One’s ribs shouldn’t be prison bars.
When I think about it, I’m happily bewildered that people will preorder my books They’ll preorder me. What a lucky guy!
I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears.