Sometimes I read a biography of some tempestuous artist and find myself longing for fireworks! booze! bloody fights!; I do think that life must be so much more thrilling when you’re actively miserable.
Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.
The darkest period of my life, so far, arrived the summer I was pregnant with my eldest son. The future was growing in me with all of its terrifying unpredictability, and I found myself anxious, unable to work and woefully at sea.
My childhood was as conventional as you could get.
If theres a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.
A lot of my work comes from a place of despair or fear. I often write in order to gain some sort of control over aspects of my life or the world that seem too dark to look at directly.
The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.
Fiction is always a utopian task, in that there’s an ideal you hold in your head as you write which inevitably fails in the moment of creation, in the insufficiency of words to convey meaning, or in the way the work is completed in the reader’s head.
It’s wonderful that nothing you write is ever going to be as beautiful as what’s in your head, because that gap is where the art can enter and begin to stretch its limbs.
I won’t walk under scaffolding or under ladders. I wear things like a baseball player wears things that are supposed to have luck. I am superstitious about everything.
We need the skeletons of other stories to understand our own, sometimes.
I see ghosts everywhere, and that is partially a function of my being incredibly near-sighted and reading way too late into the night.
I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.
I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.
Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.
It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you’d find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual.
You had to pick up a landline to make sure your best friend wore a matching outfit to school. I do remember people talking more. Nostalgia is dangerous, though.
I’m always hungry for people.
I love Twitter. It’s like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you’re tired of them.
In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they’re living for the length of a book inside another person.
While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That’s more than connecting.