I have to be in this frame of mind where I’m feeling pity for myself, and feeling pity for the world. Once I’ve attained the summit of this, then I have to sit down and write.
Hollywood invariably has trouble with unadorned representations of the poor and the disadvantaged whose life stories may not produce positive resolutions in the form of glamor, adventure, triumphant individualism, and social mobility.
We’re often mistaken — and the more grandiose the ambition, the more revealing our mistakes may be.
My thoughts tend to run toward worst-case scenarios and I’m quick to misread social cues or assume the worst, and because it’s the way I process data, I have to assume it’s going to keep showing up in my writing.
We need to speak the name of terrible things occasionally, to touch these things with our imaginations, in order to be reminded that the euphemisms we use are not the thing itself.
If given my druthers, everything I write would be some B horror movie “Swiss Family Robinson” situation. That just seems to be where I live, narratively.
Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.
There’s something about language that to me is so special, and I feel like it goes right past all my logical brain workings. It feels like a drug.
The fiction writer, at least, creates the lie to contain the truth.
Every biography is a failure in some way. It’s laced with all kinds of opacities, instabilities.