More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 11, 2020 - November 13, 2022
“No, I’m not a storyteller. I’m a story watcher.”
“Well, maybe once a month, I dream,” he says. “But I usually don’t. I think it’s because I get to dream when I’m awake, so I don’t have to dream when I’m sleeping.”
My style is like my eyeglasses: through those lenses, the world makes sense to me.”
“My belief is that I should be strong physically in order to write strong things”:
“When I was in my teens, in the 1960s, that was the age of idealism. We believed the world would get better if we tried. People today don’t believe that, and I think that’s very sad. People say my books are weird, but beyond the weirdness, there should be a better world. It’s just that we have to experience the weirdness before we get to the better world. That’s the fundamental structure of my stories: you have to go through the darkness, through the underground, before you get to the light.”
There are three types of emotional wounds: those that heal quickly, those that take a long time to heal, and those that remain with you until you die.
Sometimes asking the right question is better than getting the right answer. I’ve always kept that in mind in my life, and as I’ve
So I look around that world and I describe what I see, and when I come back. Coming back is important. If you cannot come back, it’s scary. But I’m a professional, so I can come back.
I think there are three points to this anecdote: one, criticizing someone is easy; two, creating something original is very hard; three, but somebody’s got to do it.
When I write, I can dream intentionally.
I think life is a kind of laboratory where you can try anything. And in the end, I think it was good for me because I became tough.
Franz Kafka loved slopes: that’s a lie; I made it up. But is it good? It’s very likely that Franz Kafka loved slopes. It’s possible. Some people quote that, you know. But I made it up. I made up many things.
