I have lots of fiction in the drawer, but the essays I mostly kick out into the world, ready or not. Fiction incubates differently, I suppose.
This can't be true but I remember it.
Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.
I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.
There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.
It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.
Think outside the box, collapse the box, and take a f**king sharp knife to it.
Never was I so devout as when I composed The Creation. I knelt down each day to pray to God to give me strength for my work. . . . When I was working on The Creation I felt so impregnated with Divine certainty, that before sitting down to the piano, I would quietly and confidently pray to God to grant me the talent that was needed to praise Him worthily.
Do not teach too many subjects and what you teach, teach thoroughly.
The "end of history" has been proclaimed many times, always falsely.