The pressure of meeting the expectations, his own and from others, of “genius” created personal stress that no doubt was a factor in Wolfe’s early death.
“If the city of my birth should wish to perpetuate my name clearly but harmlessly,” Steinbeck once suggested, “let it name a bowling alley after me or a dog track or even a medium price, low-church brothel.”
Hemingway once explained: There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. If that is the case, then there was much blood shed in this barn.
Bowie . . . is the most important artist of the last forty years, for me, in any medium — any medium, books, anything.
What we hide and what we try to obfuscate, what we avoid, the ways in which we deceive others and deceive ourselves — all this is so much a part of who we are.
Works of literature talk to each other; writers speak to each other through the ages. That’s exactly what Markson’s books bring up to the fore.
You come up with a color, or you come up with a word, or you come up with a chord, which maybe seems random, and then you just sort of decide, well, random or not, this is the door that I am going to enter.
In reading, we become ghosts. In reading, we can leave the Earth and, as it were, inhabit a different realm.
I can’t keep myself from conversation. I urge you to read in solitude, but I also want to pull you out of that solitude and create some sort of dialogue.
I am always on my way somewhere. I have never reached my destination.