Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have a concentrated period of work for about five months, and then I take a bunch of time off. That's just the way I work.
In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.
I don't ever work in a way where something is an illustration of an event, but when something is occurring at the same time I see it as very informed by that.
Being in the hospice didn't work out exactly the way I had expected. By all rights, I should have finished my time here in mid-March 2006 - at least, that's when Medicare stopped paying.
I'm a competitor. Any time you work hard and you envision something a certain way and it's not going as you planned and you see it, you know, you go back to the drawing board and you figure it out.
I've been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats' ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem, it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning.
Teaching is a distraction and a burden, but it's also an incredible stimulus. And a reprieve, in a way. When you're trying to work on something and it's not going anywhere, you can go to school and there's a two-and-a-half-hour block of time in which you can accomplish something.
Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn't a rule about this. But there's a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.