I really do know football.
Memory is, of course, a trickster.
The Dream Lover-what a bold, insightful, and enticing novel. And how vigorously Elizabeth Berg brings us the iconoclastic life of George Sand. Berg writes with such intimacy and compassion that I think she must have some shared ancestral DNA with Sand. I savored every page.
I was born and grew up in Fitzgerald, way down in south Georgia. It was a mill town and my family ran the cotton mill. My grandfather was mayor many times and my family felt deeply rooted to that spot.
I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have.
I got the idea that to write books would be the best way to spend a life. I never thought of anything else that seemed like half as much fun, although in my next life I would like to be an architect, too, so I can have an easier time restoring houses.
I find that other countries have this or this, but Italy is the only one that has it all for me. The culture, the cuisine, the people, the landscape, the history. Just everything to me comes together there.
A certain portion of mankind do not believe at all in the existence of the gods.
Death is a large form of entertainment, probably the largest. Watching death in different ways is entertaining for us, whether it's a high-speed chase and a guy grabs a helicopter and flies away. We know the reality of it is that he wouldn't be physically able to hold onto that helicopter and fall to his death. But it's entertaining to watch.
It just seemed like a lot of my work centered around England for a number of years.
I think that television lately has been extremely dark and, in some ways, cynical but I also think that people who are writing those shows probably feel exactly as I do - that sometimes the darkness of a story can highlight the light in a story. There's a lot of cynical stuff but I think it may be even more in movies now where you see so many movies about cynical and corrupted characters. That's the state of many movies right now but movies, television, all of culture, there's always going to be a battle between the stories that are cynical and stories that are hopeful.