[Yet the writer's lot has particular satisfactions.] When a novel is published, however it's received, ... it is the book you wrote, and a better version is not sitting on the cutting-room floor because your distributor insisted on 17 ill-advised cuts. |
A movie star seemed simply like the nearest equivalent we've got, we who live blessedly free of a monarchy, to that sense of the human form exalted, the life made fabulous simply by who and what the person is. |
a whole new way of living and thinking about ourselves suddenly burst upon us. And walking through all this, there's Walt Whitman saying 'I find it all remarkable and strange and beautiful'. I was so struck by his ecstatic moving through this terrible place, and I thought he should be the spirit and soul of the book. |
and didn't feel especially good at it but did feel a kind of bottomless interest in the process, which has never ceased. |
Before there was any talk of a movie, people would sometimes ask me what actors I would imagine playing these characters. And the only thing I could ever say is: I have such a clear idea of these characters that they'd have to play themselves. |
But Scott is the only one I've met. |
I think great poetry is enormously powerful, |
I think of the people who commit these acts as children. They're in their 20s, but like certain children, they have been told only one story, over and over. Like most children, they believe in an easily identifiable good and evil, and like most children, they are capable of unthinkable cruelty. |
I'd have liked to tell him something I'd taken almost 60 years to learn: that we owe the dead even less than we owe the living, that our only chance of happiness - a small enough chance - lay in welcoming change |
I'm a remarkably unremarkable person |
I'm sure there are any number of Hollywood producers who option novels and think, 'maybe this would make a good opera, |
If anything, I thought - and this view was shared by my publisher - that "The Hours" was going to be my arty little book and sell maybe a few thousand copies, and march with whatever dignity it could muster to the remainders tables. |
If you've really loved a book, or a movie for that matter, really loved it, what you want is that same book again, but as if you've never read it. And when you get something unfamiliar, you feel betrayed. |
It has not been given adequate funding. It lacks all of the tools it needs, so this is an effort to revive this program. |
It's like a light went off right at that moment, ... I could see my project. I knew I had something. I literally started working on it that next day. |