I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book, and then making up my own mind.
I’m not the guy to ask about the most up to date stuff.
I’m trying to make sure that there’s comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.
I believe in the absolute and unlimited liberty of reading. I believe in wandering through the stacks and picking out the first thing that strikes me. I believe in choosing books based on the dust jacket.
The Ice Storm, because of the movie, has had, or is to have, a vigorous life in other cultures.
Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.
In general, each form is a relief from the other forms. I can’t write a novel after a novel. I just use up all the material each time, and I need to rest.
I always feel I have made unfilmable books. I even felt that way about a book of mine that was later made into a movie. But my wife, who has made two films, thinks this one would make a very original film. I’m all for original films.
I sort of hate the novel when it doesn’t push, restlessly, against the tradition and the traditional.
I read a lot of The Canterbury Tales on my phone, because I was cycling between three different editions, and I needed to have a middle-of-the-night edition for the insomniac reading.
I am excited by Samantha Hunt. She’s a writer I really admire a lot.
Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?
If God had designed the orchestra, then the cello was His greatest accomplishment.
Cool is spent. Cool is empty. Cool is ex post facto. When advertisers and pundits hoard a word, you know it’s time to retire from it. To move on. I want to suggest, therefore, that we begin to avoid cool now. Cool is a trick to get you to buy garments made by sweatshop laborers in Third World countries. Cool is the Triumph of the Will. Cool enables you to step over bodies. Cool enables you to look the other way. Cool makes you functional, eager for routine distraction, passive, doped, stupid.
I am not that creative. And therefore you must be real.
Normally, I am a little insecure about myself without a shirt on, as my days of being attractive are now behind me.
The thing you did to alleviate the loneliness was to take off your clothes and touch someone, even if you didn’t really know the person well.
Never the romance without the bloodshed!
The sounds of southwestern cacti are broadcast for several weeks until, by general assent, it is agreed that cacti make no sounds.
He seemed as though he were habitually preparing himself for something awful, and this was justified because many awful things had happened to him.
Deviants and losers and mutants and the loveless... were the proper readers of Marvel comics.