When I was a kid, I loved Sherlock Holmes. I'm not interested in crimes. I'm interested in the mind of the detective and his process, which to me is a lot like the artist.
Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
We don't want to live in the dark moods of imponderable mystery, but neither do we want to miss them altogether. they allow us to emerge from the tender sadness of the manger to sing with the angels in the skies above.
What language shall I borrow To thank Thee, dearest Friend, For this, Thy dying sorrow, Thy pity without end? O make me Thine forever, And should I fainting be, Lord, let me never, never Outlive my love for Thee.
Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.
One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice.
I have taught students from the New York City area so long I have a special affinity and rapport with them. It surprises me sometimes that there are students from anywhere else.
He who never made a mistake, never made a discovery.
Burnett fidgeted. She had never seen Burnett like this. He looked like a kid who needed to go to the bathroom.
Michael [Jackson] reconstructed his face and deconstructed the African features into a spooky European geography of fleshly possibilities, and yet what we couldn't deny, that even as his face got whiter and whiter his music got Blacker and Blacker. His soul got more deeply rooted in the existential agony and the profound social grief that Black people are heir to.
A charmed life old goodness hath; the tares may perish, but the grain is not for death.