I'd studied English literature and American history, but the English literature, which I thought was going to be helpful to me in an immediate way, was the opposite. So I had to un-think a lot of things and move out of my own head, and I learned a lot. It was like graduate school, but an un-graduate school or an un-school.
Obviously the Internet makes everything easier - you get people's addresses and so on and everything seems much more accessible.
I think it's very hard to reconcile oneself to the notion that it may not matter what you think if you still want to write.
Kafka wrote the great line: "my education has damaged me in ways I do not even know." And that's always been a signature motto for me.
I am interested in people, and I am interested enough in people that I want to be friends with a lot of people and know about their lives. So I'm not a hermit. I'm also interested in writing about other things. It goes on and on. I sometimes wish that I had a different personality. But then I would write different types of books.
Nothing is a matter of age. It's really in the person because you can publish book after book after book and still want that golden apple. And maybe it's the reality principle that has hit me. I believe that a career is very different from writing. My career is a certain kind of career.
I think the major device for me is that narrator's voice. I'm always trying to find a different kind of form to tell whatever story it is, and I wish that weren't so, because it drives me crazy.
I think there's much more privileging of the new in art. I think people want to think they privilege the new in writing, but I agree with Virginia Woolf. She wrote a great essay called "Craftsmanship" about how difficult it is to use new words. It's really hard, but you see them coming in because obviously, if you're going to write... I mean, even to write "cell phone" in a novel - it's so boring.
I write about what I'm thinking about. I write about what is bothering me or what is a political, aesthetic, or ethical issue or something, and then I figure out how to do it. I don't write essays that kind of just sustain one thought. I tend to move around because that's what I like.
I think those women who get themselves to write essays, it's not an easy thing to do because as women, you're not encouraged to think; you're encouraged to feel. This is a broad, broad statement. So I think those women who go out on a limb and publish essays are highly conscious of how they are writing their opinions.
Reading gave me great comfort and pleasure. When I started being able to write, around seven or eight, I wanted to be able to do that myself, to create that other world.
You learn to read in kindergarten or first grade, and suddenly there's this other world that isn't your family or your school or your friends. It's something else.
As a reader myself, which precedes my being a writer, of course, I read in order to enter another world.
People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.
A book coming out into the world can be a harsh, harsh time. And your feelings are on the line. Everything that publication is about is really not what your writing is about. Your writing is coming out of something else, and publication and being in the public are something else. And those of us who have published, in whatever way we're published, are very fortunate.
I think many writers really believe that being published is a traumatic experience.
In depression, you're flattened. Your energy level is gone. When I'm anxious, I tend to have more energy. But it depends on the nature of the anxiety. The anxiety to finish something would seem to be more productive than the anxiety that says, "You're feeling sick."
You could say this word is better to use than that word, this sentence is good and that sentence isn't. But you don't determine the value of your work for other people.
It wasn't that I wanted to be an artist. But when I took my first drawing class with the painter Doug Ohlson, I could never finish a drawing.
When something in a sequence is edited, if you repeat an image, but in a different place, the effect is different. Because the brain is remembering, and the different juxtaposition triggers other memories, thoughts, ideas, and so on.
I'm very interested in animal behavior, and the relationship of human beings to other animal behavior.
People in the upper classes can just as easily be indifferent to their own body, or treat themselves as badly, as people who don't have the money. There are always differences among differences.
People, no matter the economic class, find ways to feed their narcissism.
I like to invent the dialogue that I want to have heard.
I'm interested in reality but I'm not interested in realism at all. I'm interested in the ways that I think people want to relate.
