When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
From Joan Didion
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.
I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.
Memories are what you no longer want to remember.
You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence.
Style is character.
One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don't make sense.
5 perspectives
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1 perspectives