If a police officer arrests a mime does he need to tell him he has the right to remain silent.
You take something from your past that you're somewhat ashamed about and you write about it from another character's point of view.
There was a time when self-promotion was considered so verboten especially for authors.
I come from a newspaper background so maybe I'm attuned to current events.
I come from a newspaper background so maybe Im attuned to current events.
I realized the structure in a collection is how they're put together. Structuring the collection became the art of it for me. Because the stories had all been written.
At peace? Who but the insane would ever be at peace? What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? Who could live even a day and not feel the sweet ache of regret?
It's one thing to know what people want. It's another to CREATE that want in them. To BUILD that desire.
He thought it might be the most intimate thing possible to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon.
I'm a writer and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.
Life he thought is a blatant act of imagination.
A writer needs four things to achieve greatness Pasquale: desire disappointment and the sea." "That's only three." Alvis finished his wine. "You have to do disappointment twice.
I don't know a family that isn't touched by some sort of addiction.
If you come from money and you become an addict you go to the Betty Ford Clinic you get treatment. If you're living on the street and you're an addict it's much harder to find your way out.
The whole world is sick...we've all got this pathetic need to be seen. We're a bunch of fucking toddlers trying to get attention.
My desk is an antique with bookshelves built into the side. I've turned the drawer over to hold a keyboard. We live in a 100-year-old house and I work in an apartment above the carriage house.
He found himself in habiting the vast empty plateau where most people live between boredom and contentment.
The war in Iraq the abuse of detainees electronic eavesdropping Guantanamo Bay - these things were all done on our behalf and they may turn out in the end to have created more terrorists.
I'm certainly eclectic in my writing.
Without sounding overly sentimental about the process I'd say trying to describe how you tend to conceive of a book is like describing how you tend to fall in love.
What business does memory have with time?
You have to do disappointment twice.
I tend to like the last sentence I just wrote which is: 'It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches.'
What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he was dead?
This is what happens when you live in dreams he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.
I've been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from Hollywood for years.
I think I would explode in flames of irony if I were to option an idea that I was satirizing in a novel.
The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.
The form is so malleable and can do so many things.
With Facebook and Twitter we're all our own little publicists in a way.
There are some people whose Twitter feeds are works of art. They intuitively understand how much of themselves to put out there.
I've been a dad since I was nineteen so I think a lot about fatherhood and the power of that sacrifice in your life.
The first seven years that I wrote fiction I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25.
He considered it a shame when people couldn't grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.
No one gets to tell you what your life means!
The stories tend to be what I work on when I'm stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I'll think that's more of a story.
Because I'm a novelist I think in terms of structure. The way I keep going is through structure. It's what inspires me and pushes me through.
And even if they don't find what they're looking for isn't it enough to be out walking together in the sunlight?
You probably have to trust that your work is following certain themes and certain movements but then the rest is a kind of piecing together so that the whole becomes larger than the parts.
There was a real conflation of hero and victim in the wake of 9/11 in our perverse desire to create a triumphant myth out of pure tragedy.
I'm a professional. So before I published any novels I'd always been writing stories.
I think the path to becoming a writer has become more through the novel. It's easier to get a novel published than a book of stories obviously especially through big publishers.
And if a moment exists only in one's perception anyway then perhaps the rush of feeling he has now is THE MOMENT and not merely its shadow.
He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life but when one of them is also the right thing he would be a fool not to choose it.
Sometimes what we want to do and what we must do are not the same. Pasquo the smaller the space between your desire and what is right the happier you will be.
All we have is the story we tell.
His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.