The greatest obstacle to discovering the truth is being convinced that you already know it.
Subjectivity is my middle name, a trick memory is my pack mule, and self-contradiction is my trusty old jackknife.
New York has no truck with the past. It expels its dead.
I've always assumed it to be an absolute requirement for being a writer: to find all emotions and the sources of all behaviors somewhere within yourself.
Self-reinvention is an essential trope of the American project, closely linked to another such trope: going on the lam. Both are regularly featured in movies and novels and suchlike. Criminals and persons loitering with and without intent hold a crucial place in the culture. For obvious reasons, the culture cannot endorse this behavior, even as it is in thrall to it.
I wasn't born in New York and I may never live there again, and just thinking about it makes me melancholy, but I was changed forever by it, my imagination is manacled to it, and I wear its mark the way you wear a scar. Whatever happens, whether I like it or not, New York City is fated always to remain my home.
Many writers and artists portrayed the poor sympathetically, and even fought on their behalf, but they themselves were not of that class. Gay life is perhaps even more subject to ambiguity, since it so often involves crossing classes.
I collect jewelry for a story - so something I got on a trip or something I got from my family. You know it always needs to have a meaning for me.
Rich people believe "You can have your cake and eat it too. " Middle-class people believe "Cake is too rich, so I'll only have a little piece. " Poor people don't believe they deserve cake, so they order a doughnut, focus on the hole, and wonder why they have "nothing. "
I thought I was gonna be an attorney, so I went to Dartmouth and I was a government major and I minored in environmental policy, and I didn't do anything academically around the arts.
It's not enough to bash in heads. You've got to bash in minds.