Seventies macho was both a look – moustache, jeans, leather jacket – and an attitude – cool, heartless, virile – that were reactions against the old-style homosexuality of too much art and too much emotion.
Because this is another thing your average American man in crisis does: he tries to go home, forgetting, momentarily, that he is the reason he left home in the first place, that the home is not his anymore, and that the crisis is him.
The very nature of marriage means saying yes before you know what it will cost. Though you may say the “I do” of the wedding ritual in all sincerity, it is the testing of that vow over time that makes you married.
If you let yourself abandon the I-should-know-this-already attitude and simply accept your ignorance without giving yourself a hard time about it, then you can learn whatever it is you need to learn.
Love takes courage, if you’re doing it right. Not the kind of courage a soldier has, but the kind of courage a writer has. Say, I’m a writer, and I’m a lover—therefore I must be courageous.
There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.
There are as many ways to discover your story as there are to trip over a dog in the kitchen--and some of them feel about as planned.
Sometimes, when it’s going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the...
In this age of censorship, I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced-writers' voices, teachers' voices, students' voices-and all because of fear.
RE: Kindle, iPad, et cetera: For a researcher, these new ways of accessing information are just extraordinary. I thing it introduces the possibility of a new standard of cognitive exactness and precision. ~ Rebecca Goldstein, author of Properties of ...
The interplay of the aesthetic with the erotic is complex. The peacock's tail is beautiful to us, sexy to the peahen. Beauty and sexual attractiveness overlap, coincide. They may be deeply related. I think they should not be confused.
I remember a friend many years ago who had taped a sign to his refrigerator: There's a dream dreaming us. If you try to think about what that means it makes your mind silly, but that silliness is good.
Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world.
MYTH: Beautiful Writing Trumps All REALITY: Storytelling Trumps Beautiful Writing, Every Time
...what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.
If I ask you to think about something, you can decide not to. But if I make you feel something? Now I have your attention.
Perfection should generally be avoided in a character. Real people, such as your readers, aren’t flawless and chances are they are not going to be able to fully identify with a character who is.
What is your advice to young writers?" "Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes." "What is your advice to older writers?" "If you're still alive, you don't need any advice." "What is the impulse that makes you create a poem?" "What makes you take ...
There must be an alternative between Hollywood and New York, between those two places psychically as well as geographically. The University of Iowa tries to offer such a community, congenial to the young writer, with his uneasiness about writing as a...
The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they m...
But writers experience the world and themselves in a unique way. We look for meaning. We see it even when we are not paying attention, which is seldom because, as writers, paying attention is what we do. We are scribes to the ticking of the days, and...
