We live in a culture that has never really encouraged artists; that has never prioritized art as something worthy to do with your life. …. Any movement that can encourage people, that says, “Yeah, you can do this,” is worthwhile.
I could see the magic of these adult faces becoming children, reflecting the pathos of the stage, being so unguarded. It’s a magical thing when that happens. They’ve lost their self-consciousness and they are breathing literally as one person in the audience.
I can try to tell the facts, but I still end up with fictions. (I believe history is a many-layered fiction.) I can’t include all the pertinent details, and without them, I can only tell a partial truth. But does it matter? Yes, I think it matters. I wish I could do more justice to the world.
For Lucretius, the idea of a “swerve” was what secured the idea of human freedom. All you needed was the tiniest movement of the atoms …. It’s tiny, but it actually turns out to have huge consequences.
We all get taught how to construct a paragraph, and how to use the digital editing system, and how to do HTML code for Wordpress, and nobody ever talks to us about what’s actually the engine behind the whole thing — which is, well: where are you going to get an idea?
Newfoundland is a pretty remote, tiny place. It’s so small that it’s amazing it makes any impact on the rest of the world at all.
We love metaphors because they give us the feeling that the world is unified or connected, that there is an underlying relationship between all things that we sense but can’t always name or describe.
When I was a kid, opening a sci-fi or fantasy book with a map inside front cover was always thrilling — to look at this imaginary landscape. And it’s still thrilling. I’m still a sucker for books where the first thing you see is a map…because of this feeling that you’re going into another world.
In a way, I write about sports so I can write about writers without, well, writing about writers which is, in most instances, pretty boring.
“I wouldn’t say that I was setting out to try to write ‘metafiction’ or ‘postmodern’ fiction – although I can’t deny that that’s probably what I wrote. For a long time, I thought that I was writing an impossible book, that the book just wasn’t going to pan out.”