Practice the vocabulary of love - unlearn the language of hate and contempt.
I should like to elbow aside the established pieties and raise my martini glass in salute to the mortal arts of pleasure.
With iron and blood, it seems, and from the rich depths of the earth, John Griswold has fashioned a classic American novel, its dignified intonations of our young nation's sweat and tears evocative of the indelible storytelling of Dos Passos, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair.
It is no secret that souls sometimes die in a person and are replaced by others.
I'm asked all the time, "Doesn't it feel great to finish the novel?" And the answer to that is, "No. " It's sort of a loss to stop a 10-year project, which is an imaginary project in the sense that it's a work of my imagination. The people who I've lived with for 10 years in my imagination are now sort of defunct. To lose them is rather a mournful process - it's not a relief.
The biggest challenge in the research process is to let go, to stop, to say enough, and then to reduce all of that beloved labor down to a few succinct paragraphs that shape the background to your narrative. I love research - that's all the fun, especially in the field. To write, however, is to suffer, and my pieces usually come in thousands of words over the assigned length. That's a serious flaw in my writing process - shaping and disciplining the footlockers of material one has so happily gathered.
Trying to get the sentences right and the structure of the narration right is about as big a job as I can handle. But I also know that if you handle that job properly, everything else just clicks into place.
My reputation is a media creation.
Lack of understanding of the true nature of happiness, it seems to me, is the principal reason why people inflict sufferings on others. They think either that the other's pain may somehow be a cause of happiness for themselves or that their own happiness is more important, regardless of what pain it may cause. But this is shortsighted. No one truly benefits from causing harm to another sentient being. . . . . In the long run causing others misery and infringing their rights to peace and happiness result in anxiety, fear, and suspicion within oneself.
You have to endure what you can't change.
And I think if you're going to be with somebody, you owe it to them to show yourself.