Wolves. . . are a balance wheel of nature.
I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.
I don't think I will write anything that could be even remotely considered a genre novel from this point on. I think I've graduated.
I'm trying to be less bombastic. I love my books. I think I've done things nobody else has done.
I don't think I came out of anybody. I think I developed out of the influences I described in My Dark Places. American history, L. A. of the 1950s. I'm comfortable with that.
My guys are morally weak, and they reach toward a tenuous knowledge of self-sacrifice, and sometimes it's too late. I find that moving. It's not a life I'd want to live. But, then, I'm not completely my books.
I'm not interested in popular culture. I hate Quentin Tarantino. I rarely go to movies. I hate rock 'n' roll. I work. I think. I listen to classical music. I brood. I like sports cars.
Today, people no longer go out with a total look or ensemble taken straight from the runway. Customers mix and match between labels and between price points. The idea is to create something for yourself: what you want, and how you want it. I realize that shoppers want more flexibility and choice now.
As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history. " History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.
You make love for the pleasure and the passion and for the love that two people have for each other. But then there is also this other thing. Are we going to make love to have a child? One has to be clear to do that.
We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.