Baseball is a game where you are always waiting, and then when something happens it's like turning a kaleidoscope when you were a kid.
I get to meet writers, and I love writers.
I love baseball. What I love about baseball is that you are always waiting.
I can't imagine having the courage to ask a publisher to do a whole book of my poems.
I enjoy going to campuses and reading and doing a class or teaching and then running away and not having to grade papers.
I'm not a philosopher. I am the next thing to a jock, which is a novelist.
There is a lack of context in contemporary education. And contemporary consideration - because we live in those interiorities so much. Especially young kids who live by surfing the Web.
In a way, I see my fiction as having moved in that direction - and the characters as dealing simultaneously with their personal history and with the present in which they are trying to make their way. So that the books are simultaneously about public and interior events. And I am having a great time getting confused and crazed writing about them.
History is beautiful stories or scary stories, yeah.
You have to read history. You have to have a sense of history.
I'm an amateur, so I read what's interesting to me.
When I am writing a novel I try not to read great prose stylists into which I will fall.
What I try to do is read stuff that won't deal with the dangerous dark things I hope I am writing about.
I read a lot of poetry. I read some history.
My heroes are people like Philip Levine, who is simply like a god to me, as a writer. And he is a very good man, too.
I love thrillers. I would even read certain science fiction, although I haven't been a devotee for many years.
I always write the best that I can. And I won't publish it until I have done it right.
Stephen King has the exact ability that Charles Dickens had. To get to his readers in spite of or despite anything the reviews say.
I know important literary writers who can't get published.
First-book novelists and storywriters haven't yet failed and so it's easier to publish them - you can gamble on a success. Whereas someone who has written four books that are highly literary and demanding and require you as a reader. They may not be republished.
Hollywood is the model for publishing, more and more. Not just blockbusters either.
If you can propose a memoir, even if you are eighteen years old - and what do you remember? What are you memeing? If you can propose a memoir, I believe someone will pay you to write it. And you will get a contract for nonfiction. And if it is about victimology in one way or another than you'll get more money. It's a sensation.
I always had good students.
Let's look at what the books are that are being produced. More and more they are being made like movies. To sell. They are being tested out.
We are herding the young in that direction so that they are not sitting still and contemplating, Goddamn it, a page of exquisite prose by Charles Dickens, which is filled with rage about poverty and the need of a household to survive. That's not in the table for consideration now. And people don't understand that beautiful rage of Dickens because they don't share it. They haven't got time to worry about an oppressed culture, a subclass.
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