Interviews with interesting people. Subscribe: RSS
"People who make up their own system seem to me the ones that are most admirable. I really want to believe whatever mythology I put together for myself aesthetically, ethically and personally will see me through to my death. If it can't do that, then I've been barking up the wrong tree all along."
"The idea is that you love the character that you are following and that you have affection for that character and that you trust the narrator."
"To me the plot is really, really important. I don't accept the premise that if it's written in a really great way, then anything is interesting."
"You really can't throw a rock in North Carolina without hitting a good writer."
"If I'm really low, if I'm not doing well in my own life, maybe I want to sit down and go somewhere else. Maybe I want to write about a ridiculous family reunion in Nebraska, to not be in whatever my present emotion is."
"If you stopped to think about the ironies, you wouldn't get very far in any kind of media business in this day and age."
"You have to be pretty honest to be a fiction writer. You have to be smart enough to see the world for yourself and honest. The whole book-publicity thing is not really honest, at base."
"Punish the guilty. Do justice to the victims. It's not to ask very much. This is a rich society that won the Cold War. It has nothing to fear from this inquiry. That's what justice would look like."
"The rich know almost nothing about the poor. They don't clean their houses. Whereas the poor can turn on TV, not only house cleaners, and see how the rich live. And if you are a house cleaner you know exactly how individual rich people live."
"People who live the kind of lives that I write about want escape from those lives. They don’t want to dwell imaginatively in the lives that they are living. They want their books to be set on Capri. And why the hell not!"
