I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It’s a challenge to the powers that be. It’s saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.
That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.
I would do something and let it sit for three months… just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn’t quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.
Oh, love is very much a physical thing…. I realize that it’s very complicated, and I’m sure it can’t be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it’s very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.
“Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock.
I think people all over the institution recognize that different ways of understanding are valuable. Artists may think in a different way than biologists or chemists, but you can learn something from that.
We don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.
One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.
That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination,
You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.
