It's not a beard, it's an animal I've trained to sit very still
In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.
But I've married a deeply sensible person who is extremely good at talking me down from my various ledges, and who takes care of me in a billion ways.
I have a feeling that books are a lot like people - they change as you age, so that some books that you hated in high school will strike you with the force of a revelation when you're older.
Sometimes I read a biography of some tempestuous artist and find myself longing for fireworks! booze! bloody fights!; I do think that life must be so much more thrilling when you're actively miserable.
My son is actually named after Beck, the musician. We heard Beck on the radio and thought that was a good nickname for a child. We named our son Beckett so we could call him Beck - we reverse engineered. And then after he was born and I saw the name on the birth certificate I realized Beckett was a really pretentious name, way too literary. Luckily he's grown into it. We nearly named my second son Dashiell. Can you imagine? Beckett and Dashiell. It would have been a disaster of pretentiousness.
The novella is at once the most elegant and demanding form: a writer must balance the looseness of a novel with the concision of a short story, a feat that only the bravest and most talented of us can manage. In Brazil, Jesse Lee Kercheval proves, yet again, that she is exactly the right writer for the job. A wild American picaresque, Brazil snaps along briskly, yet feels full-fleshed, and brims with a sly wit and grace.
After a certain point is reached the numbers cease to matter, and all that remains is the faceless mass of a crowd.
I have produced things that I would say were sincerely cheerful. But then I am reminded by other people that no one else would see them that way.
I just don't ever want to play the girlfriend. You know, the supporting character in the background who just sort of comes in and goes, "Oh, shucks. " It's just a boring character.
I wasn't much good. When I went into the line on a fake - I would holler 'I don't have it!'