Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Diminish the influence of fate
I'm really wary of self-help books.
Things don't go away. They become you.
All writers have their own pet commandments.
My training and my inclination is to invent.
The cracks in old friendships are measured in awkward pauses.
I've had menial jobs, and 'professional writer' isn't one of them.
Sometimes one learns too early, as I did, what the world is capable of.
Love wasn't a thing you fell in, but rose to. It was what stopped you from falling.
I guess when you write a personal story, people feel compelled to share their own stories.
When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.
When you know you are dying, self-deceptions fly from your bedside like embers off a bonfire.
My wife and I live in Brooklyn, N.Y., not too far from where my Long Island childhood happened.
My first book is about twins who are attached: two people who are joined and can't escape each other.
Characters stretching their legs in some calm haven generally don't make for interesting protagonists.
I have twin six-year-old boys. Have no mojo. The closest thing to a mojo I have is five minutes of peace.
I'm very strict in my belief that non-fiction should be truthful, and fiction is for invented narratives.
It's good training for a novelist to try to discern the truth about a place after only a few glimpses of it.
I suppose that, for most of us, the fascination of conjoined twins is that such people can serve as symbols.
My knowledge of trains - and love before first sight, love at negative-one sight - comes from Alfred Hitchcock.
A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.
What's Denver's feel? I know there're mountains, and people in western hats, but I never got a good sense of the city.
Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.
Society isn't good at dealing with people who have something concrete to feel guilty about or who are dealing with a loss.
Regret doesn't budge things; it seems crazy that the force of all that human want can't amend a moment, can't even stir a pebble.
Passion and platonic friendliness, often contrary siblings, frequently wear similar faces to hide the great distance between them.
The starkest rejection letter might be followed by a million-dollar advance. Don't let rejection start to look the same as failure.
Like all writing rules, the injunction to start with the trouble can be broken, and it should be sometimes - if there's good reason.
To a lot of us, literature's eternal significance had seemed beyond arguing - like, say, the illegality of government-sponsored torture.
If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn't the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?
The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever's interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom.
My prayer is improvised - though like some standard jazz performance, the improv happens within pretty strict parameters - and asks for nothing.
I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.
In each scene, the writer sets up a situation, which brings a conflict as well as either a small victory or a loss at the close of that particular scene.
Too much contemporary fiction seems purposefully to address small things in small ways. And yet why not try for the all-inclusive, the gripping, for the audacious?
Conjoined twins are identical siblings who develop one placenta out of a single fertilised ovum. No cases of conjoined triplets or quadruplets have been documented.
Usually, as a fiction writer, you get e-mails saying, 'I liked your book,' or 'I didn't like it.' You don't get something saying, 'I'm really glad this is in the world.'
A tragedy's first act is crowded with supporting players, policeman scribbling in pads and making radio calls, witnesses crimping their faces, EMS guys folding equipment.
I went to Aspen right after school and got a freelance gig writing articles for the 'Aspen Times.' I was their nightlife correspondent. They paid me fifty bucks an article.
I'm no fan of jam bands. You can take your Gov't Mule, your Phish, your Rusted Root. But Derek Trucks is a special musician - perhaps the greatest slide guitarist who ever lived.
I thought, 'I'll come back to New York. I worked for the 'Aspen Times' when I lived in Aspen. I'll work for the 'New York Times' when I live in New York.' It didn't work out that way.
I think it's a wonderful fact about Judaism - at least about the approach to Judaism I most relate to: There are no universal answers. We don't have it all figured out. God is unknowable.
I consider myself a Jewish writer - even if my characters frequently are not Jewish - in the same way, I guess, that I consider myself a Jewish man, even though I don't often attend shul.
A tragedy's first act is crowded with supporting players: witnesses crimping their faces, policemen scribbling in pads and making radio calls, EMS guys unfolding equipment, tubes and wheels.
It's a very performative thing, grief. As with so much in modern life, I think there's a whole performative layer to what we do because we feel like there's a private TV show viewing our lives.
You can work really hard and well on something, and someone you respect might hate it; worse, they're not empirically wrong for doing so. This is scary, especially for people who haven't been published.
I'd violated the primary rule of junior and senior high-- don't get people talking about you too much. This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby.
Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.
The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.
Maybe the 'Million Little Pieces' of the world are so popular because no one ever writes memoirs about PTA chairwomen; what memoirists do, and often get in trouble for, is bring interesting lives to light.