Quote collection
58 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Nicholson Baker talks about the way in which the most successful nonfiction books are those that can be boiled down into an argument so that everybody can wade in with an opinion without having to undergo the inconvenience of having to read the book itself. The more you can condense it, the better."
"There's something about New York. You can get a nice feeling of belonging as a writer here. It's probably the best city on Earth like that. I miss the wisecracking of New York."
"[William] Eggleston's photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekend he searches for the ticket - it must be somewhere - with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation."
"For so long I didn't have any kind of readership at all - I'd get published, but not read - the idea of writing for an audience is so anathema to me, it's never bothered me."
"The process of book writing for me is entirely one of trial and error."
"If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.' At first there can be a friction between our expectations of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last—and no one can concentrate on anything—for longer than about two seconds."
"I think I do have a sort of terrible propensity for boredom and for being bored, even though I am absolutely of the opinion that one shouldn't be bored and that there is no excuse for it and that it is a personal failing."
"These days any self-respecting exhibition of nude photos has to have pornographically explicit images to prove that they are works of art."
"I’m so revolted by writers taking themselves seriously that, as a kind of protest, I’ve deprioritized the role of writing in my life. I do it when I’ve not got anything better to do – and even then I often do nothing instead."
"People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories."
"Each of my book arrives at a form and a style that is appropriate to the subject."
"I always like to be in the presence of people who are good at and love their jobs, Irrespective of their jobs."
"I would agree on the aging thing. Because, at a certain point, once you start noticing it, it is your subject. And I know young that people, when they get to 30, say, "Oh, I'm so old." But actually, around 50, you do become conscious of it."
"It's this thing that's going on all the time - aging. Paul Auster quotes the poet George Opren on growing old: "What a strange thing to happen to a little boy." Which I think is so profound."
"I've never really liked L.A., because of its sprawl."
"Foreign governments are going to be poring through all these Donald Trump tweets looking for - to try and discern what it means for foreign policy."
"I don't like my books being defined by their "about"-ness. So now the subtitle has just become a kind of strap-line on the cover."
"Like most writers I spend a lot of my time sort of thinking, "It's such agony, I can't do it.""