Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm the author of my own misery.
Without curiosity a writer is dead.
Certainly there will always be stories.
Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.
I don't know what a natural thought process is.
I like to invent the dialogue that I want to have heard.
I'm interested in reality but I'm not interested in realism at all.
I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition.
People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.
People, no matter the economic class, find ways to feed their narcissism.
Boring people don't know they're boring. That's the problem with boring people.
I think many writers really believe that being published is a traumatic experience.
I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.
I don't believe a picture is worth a thousand words, unless they're very confusing words.
Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I'd been taught or unconsciously believed.
There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.
Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.
Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.
I'm very interested in animal behavior, and the relationship of human beings to other animal behavior.
As a reader myself, which precedes my being a writer, of course, I read in order to enter another world.
Any writer knows that what's left out is as essential, if not more so, than what's there. Unlearning works that way.
It's not the writer who determines how good she is anyway. Writers don't determine that. It's readers who determine that.
The Dutch and the English, former competitors for world dominance, taught me the wisdom of waiting as well as withholding.
I think it's very hard to reconcile oneself to the notion that it may not matter what you think if you still want to write.
I think it's true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don't understand what people are going through.
The literary world is more time-traveling than the art world, and novelty is much more important in art than it is in writing.
Obviously the Internet makes everything easier - you get people's addresses and so on and everything seems much more accessible.
I'm interested in reality but I'm not interested in realism at all. I'm interested in the ways that I think people want to relate.
My friends and I sometimes laugh at each other that there is so much maintenance of a body. I paid no attention when I was younger.
I still do believe that form and content are very much related. I think throwing away some of the rule books on that is a good thing.
Kafka wrote the great line: "my education has damaged me in ways I do not even know." And that's always been a signature motto for me.
It wasn't that I wanted to be an artist. But when I took my first drawing class with the painter Doug Ohlson, I could never finish a drawing.
I'm trying always to leave out what I think is extraneous. And to find what I think is the most wonderful language to make a beautiful sentence.
Writing and rewriting are the same thing to me. I don't believe what Allen Ginsberg said that "first thought, then - " I just don't believe that.
Now that I am conscious of the world of chronic pain, when I see somebody walking down the street who's having trouble, I feel a sadness for them. I notice.
[Reality] isn't simply the so-called world that you're in. Your reality is a much larger one that takes in all matter of identification and desires and hopes.
Wanting to know all kinds of things is perfect for novelists, because novelists are generalists. We're not specialists in anything, except, hopefully, writing.
Ulysses pissed me off. When Molly Bloom just says, "Yes I said yes I will Yes." And I'm thinking, You should be saying no, Molly. How about no? Saying no is great.
You learn to read in kindergarten or first grade, and suddenly there's this other world that isn't your family or your school or your friends. It's something else.
Conversation on the page should reflect what the story is about. It doesn't have to be "realistic" in the sense that it's something you heard and plugged into a story.
You could say this word is better to use than that word, this sentence is good and that sentence isn't. But you don't determine the value of your work for other people.
Reading gave me great comfort and pleasure. When I started being able to write, around seven or eight, I wanted to be able to do that myself, to create that other world.
I do think we think repetitively. It's so hard to get certain thoughts out of your head. If you're angry at a friend, you're going to keep going back to that conversation.
Whatever the style is, I want to have a sense that the writer is thinking, and really trying to get at something, and that there's a sense of discovery as the writing goes along.
I don't think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, "Your characters aren't likeable." It's not about your character winning a popularity contest. That's not the writer's job.
I think the major device for me is that narrator's voice. I'm always trying to find a different kind of form to tell whatever story it is, and I wish that weren't so, because it drives me crazy.
People in the upper classes can just as easily be indifferent to their own body, or treat themselves as badly, as people who don't have the money. There are always differences among differences.
When I'm choosing things, there's a level of intelligence I want to peel off, whether it's written in terribly simple sentences, whether it's from the point of view of a dog, or a 15-year-old boy.
I'm bothered, as a reader, when I feel the writer is filling in too much. Again, whether it's nonfiction or fiction, I think writers are providing a kind of template or platform for thinking and imagining.
I unlearned the model of being an editor like Ezra Pound with T.S. Eliot, the unconscious belief that America was the center of the world, and that honesty meant saying what I thought and always being direct.