Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
From Zadie Smith
People with children will know this: when the childcare is over, it's over on the dot. You immediately have to go into child mode; there's no down time.
I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab.
I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury.
Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
I don't take notes. I don't have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn't work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash.
All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
5 perspectives
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1 perspectives