apprentice work. |
Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise. |
Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline. |
History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. |
I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you -- it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists. |
I was back in touch with my place, |
I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't. |
Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding? |
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning. |
It seemed pretty reckless and vicious. I was just trying to depict the way it was, the way it sounded, what they talked about. This was just what I observed or imagined. |
It's an admission of the books into perpetuity. |
Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when. |
My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets / no, they're little gifts, containing meanings! |
Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts. |
Only in America do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedal pushers and mink stoles / and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn't their fault they were given a gift like speech / look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic. |