Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.
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.
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.
I never think people are too careful with me.
You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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.
We all survive more than we think we can.
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 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.
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.
Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me -- how really tenuous our sanity is.
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal -- even if you don't know it while you're doing it.
I am always writing to myself.
I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself -- there is a basic indifference toward people.
Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
I was raised an Episcopalian. And I did not and I don't believe that anyone is looking out for me personally.
I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.
One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don't make sense.
Memories are what you no longer want to remember.
I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.
I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
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.
The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities.
I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance.
Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set -- which was kind of shallow in my case anyway -- had begun to fade.
I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.
I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.
I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.
Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels dance on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.
Writers are always selling somebody out.
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.
Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.
Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.
Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves -- there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
In Brentwood we had a big safe-deposit box to put manuscripts in if we left town during fire season. It was such a big box that we never bothered to clean it out.
The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black.