The business of writing is contingent on the tastes and judgment of others. Editors, critics, Oprah. Again, we adapt to tune it all out.
Most of the time I don’t believe in God, but I always believe in the soul. When I say that I want to write about the experience of being human, I want to write about what it’s like to have a soul.
Drugs are always going to be hot.
When you’re talking about extremophile life, it’s all relative: normal to them is not normal to us.
I think it’s a love letter to language. Or maybe a “Dear John” letter.
It can’t last, that love or romance or the feeling that we have about almost anything. It can’t last; it changes. That’s not a bad thing or a good thing. It just is. That’s what we’re up against.
I wanted to write a novel about Guantanamo, to where no one else had to write another novel about it again. I think that’s the way everybody should write.
Full Stop Around The Web: Funerals, Partridges, and Waffles
Max Rivlin-Nadler on funeral conventions! Michael Schapira on Alan Partridge! Eric Jett and yours truly on The Situation in American Waffles!
“There are moments in stories by Bulgakov and by Garcia Marquez, both of whom I love, where things are never presented as potential facts: they’re just facts. I think that The Tiger’s Wife ended up dealing with whether or not something is potential fact.”
I write about people who are wondering about what it means to be a good person. That’s probably the main question that characters in this novel seem to struggle with: how are they going to manage to be happy, given that people die?