I sold a book six years after I left an MFA program. In between, there was a lot of endurance of poverty and a lot of fighting off doubt. It’s all a part of the process of being or becoming a writer.
The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.
I’m just kind of really interested in athletes as artists of a pretty serious variety and people who devote themselves to what they do in a really incredible way.
He already knew he could coach. All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story.
I feel like every time I start up, it’s like a truck you have to get into 15th gear, so you very solely crank into that mental space where you feel really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go.
Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it’s hard to say.
I do think that sports is really rich dramatically that, and this is kind of a self-serving thing to say, but I wonder why there aren’t more, better sports novels.
My favorite sports novel is End Zone by Delillo. It’s such a great looking book too, the black cover with the football player on it. It’s just a fantastic little book.
You don’t have to even see the common man anymore if you don’t want to! Only through the telescope on your yacht.
I think the MFA programs have had a real effect on the state of American fiction, but I don’t think it’s a question of “this is written by someone with an MFA, and this isn’t.” I challenge anyone to identify a book in that way. It’s totally impossible.
Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn’t necessarily say that about poetry.
It is no fun at all to have been writing a book for seven or so years, especially when you’ve never published anything before.
A lot of my close friends had tolerantly washed their hands of the whole idea of me writing a book. They had said to themselves, “I don’t know what he’s doing.”
The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.
Poetry might be more about the eternal verities, the essence of the human soul, and – although it’s reductive to say so – fiction has perhaps been more about the differences between the unconstrained world of the imagination and the realities you run into, day-to-day, when you’re riding your donkey.
Looking at and shaping your own work is a very intuitive process. You see something you’ve written in your notebook. It’s there on the page and either feels right or it doesn’t, and it’s hard sometimes to go beyond that and discover why it feels that way.
Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work.
The doctor said a ball hit me. But I don’t remember batting.” “You were in the dugout. Henry made a bad throw.” “Henry did? Really? Are you sure?” “Yes.” “Well, it’s always the ones you least suspect.” Owen let his eyes fall shut. “I don’t remember anything at all. Was I reading?” Affenlight nodded. “I warned you. It’s a dangerous pastime.
Everything that had ever happened was trapped inside him.
She’d gotten so far ahead of the curve that the curve became a circle, and now she was way behind.