No one wakes up and says, "Yay I get to mow the lawn!" But if I can find meaning there, then there's nowhere I can't find meaning.
Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.
Youth gives a sense of new days dawning bright, going on for ever, and a kind of tamped-down excitement which keeps breaking through even the worst days of poverty, depression and loneliness. But then youth is something which only exists in retrospect; you are barely conscious of it while you have it.
People hear what they want and expect to hear, not what is said.
If infinity is as they describe it, all things are not just possible but in the end certain.
The desire for self-expression afflicts people when they feel there is something of themselves which is not getting through to the outside world.
When today's young woman says she isn't a feminist what she means is she isn't a lesbian and she doesn't hate men, she likes to wear make-up and she enjoys a laugh. In which she is no different from many an early feminist.
In this country, a smart leader is suspect. That's just the way it is. Even George Bush's father, who was a lot smarter than the son, had to sort of prove that he wasn't that bright.
I will persist until I succeed. I was not delivered into this world into defeat, nor does failure course in my veins. I am not a sheep waiting to be prodded by my shepperd. I am lion and I refuse to talk, to walk, to sleep with the sheep. The slaughterhouse of failure is not my destiny. I will persist until I succeed.
The AIDS epidemic, rather than being a scourge, is a welcome development in the inevitable reduction of human population. . . If it didn't exist, radical environmentalists would have to invent it.
I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.