Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
It was only as I wrote about fear that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle.
Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.
The world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.
One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.
When people call something "original," 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.
I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.
I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.
Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can’t have. And then about what you receive and misuse.
I'm not planning what I listen to, except when I think the music can guide me to some emotional place I want to be reminded of.
I don't have a lot of paper in my immediate work environment, except when I'm doing things like checking the godforsaken proofs.
Reading and writing are the same thing; it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other.
It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.
I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.
By removing the stories from the morass of things that surround us, I'm hoping to achieve some kind of purer approach to emotional life.
I'm not too embarrassed to say I'm the definition of the target audience. This is my generation, the one of exalting music in album form.
I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow.
I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.
I tend to think of myself as a highly emotional writer. It's all coming out of the deepest feelings, out of dreams, out of the unconscious.
Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature and my love of film.
I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.
Anyone could see it all coming and no one could possibly stop it and that was the beautiful thing. Friday night was open wide and writ in stone
I suppose in a way most of my characters are non-consumers, not terribly interested in all the little baubles and artifacts of contemporary life.
Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature, and my love of film...
The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances - is plagiarism.
Music still sort of hangs up there in the sky for me as this thing that moves me so much, but I can't really make it. It's like a car I can't drive.
The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory.
The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.
I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.
I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid.
With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you're on page 300. You can't do that with film. It just charges ahead.
My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.
What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page, you turn out chaos.
I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow I keep myself sane.
I have no one to blame for the construction for myself, of course, but I'm always surprised and slightly sulky when I realizeВ people are buying the whole thing.
You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.
I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow, I keep myself sane.
I just noticed recently that in one book after another I seem to find an excuse to find some character who, to put it idiotically simply, is allowed to talk crazy.
What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.
The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.
I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. God, forget scissors - that's beyond the pale.
I definitely care about how the concept of New York punk was constructed, and why it mattered. But I wasn't gonna do that. Partly because I'm not a great journalist...
I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.
The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.
When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.
Once you fall into habits, I think, you're dead as an artist. You have to challenge yourself and never rest on your laurels, never think about what you've done in the past.
I'm gregarious with writers and never with manuscripts . . . I [like to] create the illusion of seamless perfection, so I alone know the flawed homely process along the way.
As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another.
I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.