The way 'The Icarus Girl' came about was by me just basically bragging it with a literary agent and telling him I'd written 150 pages when I'd only written 20. And I think it was when the agent e-mailed me back right the very next day after sending h...
Failures are much more dramatic than successes, and people like drama. I think this is why automobile races draw such crowds. People expect spectacular crashes, which we tend to find more interesting than cars just racing around the track. The same i...
Some people see Black Friday as a much-needed break for their wallet. I see it as retail outlets showing the customers the full weight of their contempt. The frenzy to buy cheap crap from China, the human downgrade of people fighting with each other ...
To my ears, jazz sounds better in warm weather and after the sun has gone down. While I will listen to some of my favorite jazz records in cooler weather, it's the warmer nights that really make them come alive. Something about those sounds and the h...
…Perses, hear me out on justice, and take what I have to say to heart; cease thinking of violence. For the son of Kronos, Zeus, has ordained this law to men: that fishes and wild beasts and winged birds should devour one another, since there is no ...
Kid 1: *examining my gorgeous strawberry and blueberry pies*: Wow, Mom, your pies don’t look awful this time. Me (Ilona): ... ~A little later~ Kid 2: *wandering into the kitchen* Kid 1: Hey, you’ve got to see these pies. *opening the stove* Kid 2...
One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense...
For every album, I look at where I'm at in my career and think of a title that kind of represents that. And for me, 'Night Train' was kind of a metaphor for where things have gone, from being on one bus with 12 other guys, pulling a trailer my first ...
I think the further away you get from completing a book, the more responses you see to it from readers, the more your own tastes and opinions shift and the more you start to see things you could have written differently in the detail, or done differe...
Still In the fall, I believe again in poetry if nothing else it is a movement of the mind. Summers ball together into sticky lumps, spring evenings are glass beads from one mould for standard-size youth, winter a smooth heaviness, not even cold. But ...
Whom are you going to dance with?' asked Mr. Knightley. She hesitated a moment and then replied, 'With you, if you will ask me.' Will you?' said he, offering his hand. Indeed I will. You have shown that you can dance, and you know we are not really s...
Given the trendlines of digital publishing, where more and more large platforms are profiting from, and controlling, the works of individuals, I can't stress enough: Put your taproot in the independent web. Use the platforms for free distribution (th...
Dubai was a property bubble. Plain and simple. Go to Dubai and see what happened. It was... what I call it the 'Edifice complex' - it's just, we can grow by putting up lots and lots of buildings and trying to attract people to come here, stay here, a...
The most venomous animal that lives in the ocean is the box jellyfish. And every one of those barbs is sending that venom into this central nervous system. So first I feel like boiling hot oil I've been dipped in. And I'm yelling out, 'Fire! Fire! Fi...
The selection process is simple. Hubby exhausts every ploy in his psychological arsenal to filter out the liars, fakes, and undesirables. (If only every husband were so devoted . . .) Me, I try to prove that I’m not the stereotypical single male. T...
I saw a report yesterday. There's so much oil, all over the world, they don't know where to dump it. And Saudi Arabia says, 'Oh, there's too much oil.' They - they came back yesterday. Did you see the report? They want to reduce oil production. Do yo...
There is no virtue or vice in a transitive verb, everything depends on the direct object. 'I LOVE' could be virtuous or not - you could love ice cream, Jesus, child porn, my country, hurting people, the lust of the flesh. Love is not an automatic vir...
I've never been good with asking for help; it seems risky, but at some point when things are really dicey, your stubbornness gives way to a certain form of humility that, after you get over yourself, feels liberating. I started to believe that the un...
I had no idea that "letting go" would be so complicated; that it would sometimes feel liberating and other times more sorrowful and lonely. In the long run, most of it was like standing on the shore, watching your family set sail for America, and the...
A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though,...
Why can't I solve this problem by killing someone? she though petulantly, then comforted herself with the mantra that had kept her going in prison: "Soon all the humans will be dead," she said, droning in the time-honored fashion of gurus everywhere....
