Occupation: Author Birth: February 3, 1947
For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read..
You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in ….
Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms o….
When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no b….
I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love.….
There are certain phrases in books of mine, and I don't know where they came from, or how I was capable of thinking up these formulations. It's only ….
Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man..
I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself..
I say at the very end of "Winter Journal" that I do dream about my father often. I think I have a tremendous compassion for him, which has grown over….
Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can..
Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there..
When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound..
After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years..
What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn't know how I was going to pay the rent. Now that I can pay the rent, I'm worrying about peo….
The childhood scenes [ in The Tree of Life] are tremendous. My favorite moment is when the mother levitate - for three seconds. Of course, this is ho….
I'm in constant inner dialogue with my father still..
I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that lang….
I guess of all those novels, Don DeLillo's Falling Man is the one I like the best. I thought there were some beautiful things in that, particularly t….
I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people….
I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's ….
I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive..