Structure is, for me, the most fun challenge about writing novels.
There are some writers who are done when they finish a draft because they’ve thought it through beforehand. Whereas I’ll finish a first draft and I’m nowhere near done.
I don’t usually read my reviews. I’ve noticed older reviewers are much more bothered by the plot complications. Younger reviews don’t seem to be bothered by the complications at all.
Every once in a while when I get a migraine, I like to think, “Who hates me today?”
It’s fascinating to imagine two successful writers in one house. But when you think about it, it isn’t very unusual. In fact, so many writers have writer spouses.
As a writer, you want to go somewhere else sometimes. You want to vary the terrain that you’re exploring.
When I write, I am trying through the movement of my fingers to reach my head. I’m trying to build a word ladder up to my brain.
This is why she doesn’t put much stock in so-called secrets, or the meaningfulness of untold recollections that become, in their airtight echo chambers, the supposed stuff of secrets. They are only a way to become retrospectively enraged at someone else so that your own adult weaknesses can be tidily excused.
In the midst of such uncertainty, I cling not to what I know, but what I feel.
My behavior makes perfect sense to me.
I used to be as scared of public speaking as I was of sharks. Every time I teach I get an endorphin high off the fact that I did not have a panic attack. I teach and swim in order to measure my improvement as a human. I am no longer terrified of quite so many things.
To be melancholy is to be self-haunted, and among the many reasons this is an unsatisfactory explanation for living inside a jam jar inside an aquarium, foremost among them is that there are no good stories to tell of your bleak time in a beautiful place, and no specter to blame for the fact that happiness, though it should have been inescapable, evaded you.
At a certain point, it seems more polite to just become the person people assume you to be.
My friend did not want her suspicion – which sustained the possibility that her husband both was and was not having an affair – to disappear by exposing it.
Worrying about originality is like worrying about the best place to hang your wall phone.
Women are responsible for the people in the family having pants.
I wanted to escape my head because my head is so stupid these days. I wanted to be inside someone else’s head.
Yet when this day has ended my child will be older and I will be nearer to dead. Why should I wish for this to happen any sooner than it already will?
I enjoy a misogynist so long as they have a wicked sense of humor and know, on some level, that they’re pigs. This is why I enjoy Philip Roth but not Saul Bellow or James Salter.
No girl I knew, in other words, had babies, but more than a few had had abortions. I’d attended two abortions before my own. I’d been invited along to do the driving, and hold the hands, and sit afterward in the bars and fetch the drinks. The boyfriends, though informed of our activities, were never present. Abortions are women’s work, I guess.
I reread books to measure my degree of difference from myself.