Punctuality is an essential trait of the teacher. It is a foundation, not an embellishment.
A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.
Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.
Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?
And that was all the part of it - the way you were obliged to live. You stifled a groan, you lied about your love, you deceived your legal wife, and all in the name of honour. That was the damned paradox of it - in order to behave well, you have to behave badly.
All my life I have dealt with objective matters; hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to carry out official functions.
Since I come from a family of mental instability, and I have suffered depression myself, I knew that living in shame is senseless and painful, and that by talking about it, I have come to peace with it. The stigma behind people's suffering needs to end. We as a community need to embrace these disorders, try to understand them (if only just to talk about them) so that we can cease being defined by them.
At our church I do not endorse politicians publicly. Because I am afraid that if I endorse one candidate, it would keep somebody from coming to our church. So I made one exception one time to put one bumper sticker on my car, but I don't ever do it anymore.
I guess my path feels sort of different now. . . I don't know what's going to happen, but I certainly want to make music a bigger part of my life in the future than it has been for the last couple of years.