The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.
Throw yourself into the convulsions of the world. I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't believe progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it, to look at it, to witness it. Try and get it. Seize the moment.
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos.
I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.
We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
I was in love with New York. I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
You aren't sure if you're making the right decision -- about anything, ever.
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Hand that on parting squeezes your shoulder, salutes the small of your back.
The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past ... Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.
Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life -- both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections -- have all vanished.
To believe in'the greater good' isto operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
I was four or five, and my mother gave me a big black tablet, because I kept complaining that I was bored. She said, Then write something. Then you can read it. In fact, I had just learned to read, so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something -- and then read it!
In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.
Aging and its evidence remain lifes most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.
A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.
I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. ... I think biographies are very urgent to children.
I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own garden, didn't pay much attention, behaved--I suppose--deviously. I mean I didn't actually let too many people know what I was doing.
My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.
Outside, a ceiling of pearly gray clouds coalesced over Manhattan, and the apartment had grown dark. It just keeps dripping. It's been like this all week, .. Rain would be a relief.
In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.
There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.
There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.
A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future.
Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.
It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy. That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one's memory.
It is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built The Breakers he damned himself.
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
Going back to California is not like going back to Vermont, or Chicago; Vermont and Chicago are relative constants, against which one measures one's own change. All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
The child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.
To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
To believe in 'the greater good' is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.
To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.
To make an omelette, you need not only those broken eggs but someone 'oppressed' to beat them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make 51 percent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class.
In many ways, writing is the act of saying 'I,' of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, 'Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.' It's an aggressive, even a hostile act.
It was clear, for example, in 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.
My mother 'gave teas' the way other mothers breathed. Her own mother 'gave teas.' All of their friends 'gave teas,' each involving butter cookies extruded from a metal press and pastel bonbons ordered from See's.
We imagine things -- that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. We have no choice, so we do it.
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.
When I went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends.
A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.
The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.
Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it -- I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It's challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing 'Democracy' particularly.
Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.
I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man's soul.
A lot of the stories I was brought up on had to do with extreme actions -- leaving everything behind, crossing the trackless wastes, and in those stories the people who stayed behind and had their settled ways -- those people were not the people who got the prize. The prize was California.
It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.
I have a theatrical temperament. I'm not interested in the middle road -- maybe because everyone's on it. Rationality, reasonableness bewilder me.
I can remember, when I was in college, irritating deeply somebody I was going out with, because he would ask me what I was thinking and I would say I was thinking nothing. And it was true.
I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.
All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it's very different to have the responsibility of a child.
There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person -- as if you could.
I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn't lead a writer's life at all.