I may not be a smart man, but I know what love is.
To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.
Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by "progress.
Sex almost always disappoints me in novels. Everything can be said or done now, and that's what I often find: everything, a feeling of generality or dispersal. But in my experience, true sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it. Only he or she, and no one else, would desire so very much that very person under those circumstances. In fiction, I miss that sense of terrific specificity.
People. . . have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.
There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.
Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.
There have been brilliant satires about the tax bureaucracy before, from the Beatles song ‘The Taxman’ to the film ‘Harry’s War,’ but in some ways Jim Greenfield’s The Taxman Cometh outdoes them all. His tale of a little guy who can’t take it anymore is both compelling and timely, given the tax scandals we read about in Washington almost every day.
I try to do the right thing.
Yugoslavia and Serbia will fight against terrorists regardless of whether a political agreement is reached or not.