We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone – its value is incontestable.
The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.
I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort - these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work.
Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.
I work very slowly. It's like building a ladder, where you're building your own ladder rung by rung, and you're climbing the ladder. It's not the best way to build a ladder, but I don't know any other way.
Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.
The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I'm vacuuming.
I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
Tragedy is the highest form of art.
I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.
I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.
I believe that the creative impulse is natural in all human beings, and that it is particularly powerful in children unless it is suppressed. Consequently, one is behaving normally and instinctively and healthily when one is creating - literature, art, music, or whatever. An excellent cook is also creative! I am disturbed that a natural human inclination [creative work] should, by some Freudian turn of phrase, be considered compulsive - perhaps even pathological. To me this is a complete misreading of the human enterprise. One should also enjoy one's work, and look forward to it daily.
There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.
. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.
Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.
... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.
I'm very American in the sense of being an explorer. America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A westward nation of explorers.
Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.
Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.
What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.
Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.
I never change, I simply become more myself.
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.
My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.
He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.
Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.
Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.
The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.
It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.
"Because there has been no one to stop me" has been one of the principles of my life.
The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct
The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.
I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?
Writers and artists never pay attention to advice given by their elders, quite rightly. The only worthwhile advice is the most general: Keep trying, don't give up, don't be discouraged, don't pay attention to detractors. Everyone knows this.
Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.
Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.
the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.
Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the 'self' see the 'self' with any objectivity?
See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be
I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.
Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.
Exotic: meaning you're "desired." For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.
For politics is in its essence as Adams had said, the 'systematic organization of hatred': either you were organized or you were not.
If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.
The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one's generosity? Why regret one's impulsiveness, one's misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you'd written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don't cherish us as we'd cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them.
I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them.
There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.
The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.
Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.
Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.
For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.
Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.
After love a formal feeling comes.
And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.
It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.
I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.
She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, "Why are you trying to starve yourself?" To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.
Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.
I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.
There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.
All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.
There is nothing "ordinary" about reality.
Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.
Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.
On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.
Acting is the loneliest profession I know.
Fame's carapace does not allow for easy breathing.
It's always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole.
How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.
These are the moments for which we live.
Loneliness is dangerous ... because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self.
Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.
It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we really are.
The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.
Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.
Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.
Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.
Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.
Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields - and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible.
Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.
All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.
Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.
I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.
At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say.
The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.
A daydreamer is prepared for most things.
If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this to be particularly true in the case of professors or intellectuals, who are full of fascinating information, but need encouragement before they'll divulge it.
Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.
And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.
The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.
For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.
The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.
An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.
Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!
My writing is full of lives I might have led.
The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.
Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.
The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last; nothing can guarantee it.
The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
Much in our lives is chance.
Evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior.
Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.
Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.
We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called 'culture' - and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.
Is there any mystery like who you finally turn out to be.
People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.
In love there are two things - bodies and words.
Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light.
If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.
Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal.
Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.
This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash.
The regional voice is the universal voice.
A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.
It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can't know it will be the last.
