Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, ...
When did you first feel like a grown woman and not a girl?” We wrote down our answers and shared them, first in pairs, then in larger groups. The group of women was racially and economically diverse, but the answers had a very similar theme. Almost...
We're running out of time, he said. As if time were the kind of thing you could run out of, as if it were measured into bowls that were handed to us at birth and if we ate too much or too fast or right before jumping into the water then our time woul...
The Geranium When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail, She looked so limp and bedraggled, So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle, Or a wizened aster in late September, I brought her back in again For a new routine - Vitamins, water, and wha...
Almost every time I speak to teenagers, particularly young female students who want to talk to me about feminism, I find myself staggered by how much they have read, how creatively they think and how curiously bullshit-resistant they are. Because of ...
The room was two-tiered, its marble balconies filled with rams and water nymphs in fancy dress; a kaleidoscope of colours swayed in time to the beat of hypnotic music. A concerto of absent musicians, it played only in her mind. The numerous chandelie...
When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening's Arsenal game/riot. Take away their Cockney accents, and these working-cl...
What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born. Her face, at once innocent and feral, soft and wild! Her mouth voluptuous. Ey...
Norman picked up a sketch, glanced at it, then put it back down on the table. "I saw Bea Williamson this morning," he said in a low voice. "Lurking about looking for cut glass." "Oh, of course," Mira said with a sigh. "Did she have it with her?" Norm...
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of l...
If you close your mind to the endless possibilities of dreams yet to be fulfilled, and allow your heart to grow cold, merely due to the fear of it being broken yet again . . . When the time is right, how will one then be able to see you for you & acc...
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day- A sunny day with the leaves just turning, The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play Your first game of fotball, then, like a satellite Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away Behind a scatter ...
Hearing has consequences. When I truly hear a person and the meanings that are important to him at that moment, hearing not simply his words, but him, and when I let him know that I have heard his own private personal meanings, many things happen. Th...
I mean, in the last few months alone, I've been pinned in a big set of white-water rapids, been bitten by an angry snake in a jungle, had a close escapewith a big mountain rockfall, narrowly avoided being eaten by a huge croc in the Australian swamps...
Simply raising the theme of animals in the Third Reich means that our narrative is no longer only an account of what human beings have done to one another, but also about our relations with the natural world. If,viewed against the magnitude and terro...
Speaking of libraries: A big open-stack academic or public library is no small pleasure to work in. You're, say, trying to do a piece on something in Nevada, and you go down to C Floor, deep in the earth, and out to what a miner would call a remote w...
[Murdoch opens the door to what should be Shell Beach and instead sees the same sign he saw earlier advertising it. Murdoch walks up to the sign, confused] Dr. Schreber: There is no ocean, John. There is nothing beyond the city. The only place home e...
Buggin' Out: You almost knocked me down, man. the word is "excuse me." Clifton: Ah, excuse me, I'm sorry. Buggin' Out: Not only did ya knock me down, you stepped on my brand-new white Air Jordan's I just bought, and that's all you can say is "excuse ...
[longer introduction to "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"] Narrator: And now we're going to hear a piece of music that tells a very definite story. As a matter of fact, in this case, the story came first and the composer wrote the music to go with it. It's...
Hermione: Harry, you told me you'd figured that egg out weeks ago! The task is two days from now! Harry: [sarcastically] Really? I had no idea. I suppose Viktor's already figured it out. Hermione: Wouldn't know. We don't actually talk about the tourn...
Joseph Goebbels: [in German; subtitled] How many seats in your auditorium? Francesca Mondino: [translates into French] Shosanna Dreyfus: [in French; subtitled] Three hundred and fifty. Francesca Mondino: [translates into German] Joseph Goebbels: That...
