Guys like Otis Blackwell and Bobby Darin, and all the guys who were writing songs for Elvis at the time, just hanging around, writing songs, talking about music.
Even eternally free people are enslaved by the process of living.
Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
It's peculiar what you remember when you're not trying.
What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive. It's really hard to do a literary reproduction of what makes you happy. That's what I try to do. If nothing else, it seems like there's enough people out there telling the world what isn't cool, or what's terrible, or what's depressing. I think there's an element of cynicism in my writing, but I'm an optimistic cynic.
I really hate being sick. It seems inevitable that at one point, one of these predicted epidemics is going to be real. So often they come up, and there's people like me that are freaked out, and the majority of people are just like, "You're being idiots, this happens every other year. "
I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns. It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything.
Satiety is a mongrel that barks at the heels of plenty.
Married and divorced, three beautiful daughters, two in college. The other one is 16, lives with her mom. I'm 46, I've worked for the Post Office for 18 years, seven facilities in three states.
"Undecided," while running for re-election to state Senate in 1998, in response to an Outlines questionnaire asking, "Do you favor legalizing same-sex marriage?"
I did not realize that when money becomes a core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left.