Novelists From New York City

"She [Cleopatra] was then a very young girl, but had already begun to look upon the world as a mean, dark place, in which fortune and brightness were to be had only be seizing from others what one could and keeping it in one’s hold as long as possible. Believing that there were not enough desirable things for all to have share in them, she made up her mind that the happiest person was the one who was the cleverest thief. She worked with vicious fanaticism to have what she coveted; thinking that none knew so well as herself the joy of possessing and none therefore deserved so much. When she had won her way she softened as a goddess to mortals—pouring out affection and benevolence with an abandon that was unmatchable and frightening, but irresistible. Then she was happy, and felt virtuous."

"Every woman must live by some sense of victory over disappointments, and Olympias was not the sort of woman to find compensation in her own powers of self-control and endurance."

"What second love could she [Olympias] make out of her ruined first love? The second love that most women make out of their first love for husbands grows from a mutual and tacit sadness in both husband and wife that he is only in rare moments the man both would like him to be."

"You know the story of the famous seer Phineus whom the Argonauts consulted when they stopped in Salmydessos in Thrace on their way to Colchis to get the golden fleece. He was blind, but not entirely blind - he could see just enough to see that he could not see. And the little flickering spots of light that forced themselves on him were wind-harpies trying to steal from him his prophetic power. So he would beg everyone to make him blind, to rid him of the harpies. But people laughed at him because, so far as they could tell, he was as blind as any man needed to be. Only Hercules understood, because his spirit extended into the divine shadows. Only Hercules had the courage to make the blind Phineus blind."

"Life is a mystery as deep as ever death can be; Yet oh, how dear it is to us, this life we live and see!"

"But I believe that God is overhead; And as life is to the living, so death is to the dead."

"But when a snow-flake, brave and meek, Lights on a rosy maiden's cheek, It starts—"How warm and soft the day!" "'Tis summer!" and it melts away."

"For ever and ever, my darling, yes— Goodness and love are undying; Only the troubles and cares of earth Are winged from the first for flying. Our way we plough In the furrow "now;" But after the tilling and growing the sheaf; Soil for the root, but the sun for the leaf— And God keepeth watch forever."

"Whenever a snow-flake leaves the sky, It turns and turns to say "Good-bye! Good-by, dear cloud, so cool and gray!" Then lightly travels on its way."

"Sparkling and bright in liquid light Does the wine our goblets gleam in; With hue as red as the rosy bed Which a bee would choose to dream in. Then fill to-night, with hearts as light To loves as gay and fleeting As bubbles that swim on the beaker’s brim And break on the lips while meeting."

"I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna-fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock."

"[Hollywood] is a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it — the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943 in that the ethics of it are, you know, boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that – so that means that about 50% of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don’t even wanna be in it!"

"It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, "They lived happily ever after" and the following quarter century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are entering a third era, in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know, it just might work."

"Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine. I think of it as my own personal bride's disease."

"Insane people are always sure they're just fine. It's only the sane people who are willing to admit they're crazy."

"Stare at me in this faceless way, go mad with desire, and rip my clothes off. It's terrific. In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind. The fantasy of rape — of which mine is in a kind of prepubescent sub-category — is common enough among women and (in mirror image) among men."

"I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive."

"In order for it to be good, it had to be honest on both sides [to both sexes]. Nora taught me how she sees men and how she sees me and that's what I got from her more than anything, aside from the fact that she's so funny."

"With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie."

"Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re thirty-four."

"Plastic surgery is a way for people to buy themselves a few years before they have to truly confront what ageing is, which of course is not that your looks are falling apart, but that you are falling apart and some-day you will have fallen apart and ceased to exist."

"I was so tired of seeing these stupid, cheerful books about ageing. One of them even has this whole thing in it about how you are going to have the greatest sex of your life in your sixties and seventies. Which is just garbage.I thought about it and realised that there was one circumstance that you could have the best sex of your life in your sixties and seventies. That would be if you had never had sex until you were 60 or 70."

"The function of a blog is on some level to start a conversation that you're not involved in any more because you've already had your say. That thing of coming right off the news — did you see what I saw this morning, can you believe it? — has a kind of fun appeal."

"I moved into directing for a couple of reasons. ... Most directors, I discovered, need to be convinced that the screenplay they're going to direct has something to do with them. And this is a tricky thing if you write screenplays where women have parts that are equal to or greater than the male part. And I thought, "Why am I out there looking for directors?" — because you look at a list of directors, it’s all boys. It certainly was when I started as a screenwriter. So I thought, "I’m just gonna become a director and that’ll make it easier.""

"All novels are, in their way, an act of resistance, since they insist on the importance and uniqueness of the individual life, and refuse to give in to the mass generalities on which governments and economies depend."

"There is little that matters more to me than my freedom and independence, artistic and otherwise. But I accept that once a book is put out into the world, it will be read, interpreted, and used by its readers as they see fit. I can agree or disagree, but by then the book is no longer mine; it's been given away to anyone else who cares to read it and invest themselves in it."

"Years of writing novels in an instinctive, improvisatory way — without a plan, let alone a destination — taught me something about the value of sustaining uncertainty. Of asking questions, rather than pursuing answers. About the discoveries, epiphanies, and surprises one arrives at in this way, and the wonder that follows. After a while, it begins to move from a practice in one's writing and reading to a practice in one's own life, I think."

"Everything is an old story, even what we think of as the "self" is just a narrative that our parents began telling when we were born, of which we take up authorship."

"(What kinds of books bring you the most reading pleasure these days?) NK: Novels that arrive at their coherence in unusual and elegant ways. That stretch form only to satisfy the book’s mysterious inner command. I love when I feel that both the author and I are surprised at where we find ourselves."

"The windows in my bedroom face east and have no curtains, and to wake up into that light and a book is joy as I know it. I read many books at once, all of them paper. I think the book must be the most perfect object ever designed by humans. Their physical beauty and how well they work — dayenu! — but then there is the way they often absorb their reader’s presence, too. Tea, ink, greasy fingers, receipts, weather, but more than that, something of the spirit, too, so that years later you can take the book down off the shelf and a flash of your old self leaps out at you. I won’t easily give that up."

"My mother is English, and as she was the one who read to us, my early world was A .A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl. None of them thought it necessary to protect children from darkness. On the contrary, they guided their readers right toward it. This gives one an enormous sense of being respected as a child. Not just of being trusted to handle things as they are, but to be accepted as not entirely good. To be recognized as having darkness within oneself, too. I don’t think I’ve trusted any author since who doesn’t address me with that assumption."

"All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen."

"The words of our childhood became strangers to us- we couldn't use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language."

"When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely."

"Even after the only person whose opinion I cared about left on a boat for America, I continued to fill pages with her name."

"When I got up again, I'd shed the only part of me that had ever thought I'd find words for even the smallest bit of life."

"“Once upon a time, there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered, and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword, a pebble could be a diamond, a tree, a castle. Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a house across the field, from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was queen and he was king. In the autumn light her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls, and when the sky grew dark, and they parted with leaves in their hair."

"Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering."

"These things were lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone ever taking the time to write it all down."

"Perhaps that is what it means to be a father- to teach your child to live without you. If so, no one was a greater father than I."

"Franz Kafka is dead.He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. [...] They turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees, Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice."

"Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement."

"Sometimes I think: I am older than this tree, older than this bench, older than the rain. And yet. I'm not older than the rain. It's been falling for years and after I go it will keep on falling."

"The little boy I watched throwing pebbles into the empty fountain [...] You could tell that he had too much wisdom for his age. Probably he believed that he wasn't made for this world. I wanted to say to him: If not you, who?"

"Never in his life had Alessandro had to squint in starlight, but now the stars were so bright that at times he had to cover his eyes, and when they burned too brilliantly for keeping still, they sometimes shot across the sky in short bursts. Though these quiet illuminations vanished almost as soon as they had started, they lingered in the eye’s inexact memory of their luminescent paths. Perhaps had they been stronger and more constant, and hung in a dull white line, Alessandro’s heart would not have risen each time he saw them. They were less than little puffs of smoke, their tracks thinner than a hair, the bursts of light mainly a matter of memory."

"I remember hearing Mark Helprin being interviewed on the radio about Winter's Tale. When the interviewer referred to it as fantasy, Helprin became upset and said that he didn't think of his work in those terms, in spite of the flying horse and all the other fantastic elements. The implication was that if a work is fantasy or SF, it can't be any good."

"Safe, sane and consensual — what do those words really mean? Assimilation, that's what."

"Fantasies aren't reality, I know, I know, I know. Except when they are. Except when you make them into reality."

"Fighting off a yawn (how rude), I wander past two girls earnestly discussing their upcoming scene. Red means stop. Yellow means slow down. Blue means I want to talk to you about something. Green means you can go faster, harder. I don't tell them about fisting, piss and cock-sucking, why feel older than I am? But I want to tell them about muffled yelps, screams, and the moment before the tears start to flow, that terrible moment when you know that one more sharp pain and you won't be able to hold them back. I want to tell them about watching someone's control slip away, clutching a crotch to find that there's pussy cream mixing with drops of panic-piss, about the redness of a face when the sobbing has become regular. I want to thell them about the pleas of the damned, the cries when someone doesn't know when it's going to stop, or how, only that they want their mommy, they want their master, they want to surrender and fall to the ground and feel a boot at the back of their neck. But I smile and nod and don't say a fucking thing."

"What is happening to my sexuality? It's cold, it's pasionless, and what's worse, it's dull. John Preston was right. SM has become a nice, sweet alternative to heavy petting, and the leaders of this SM "community" want us to be the Elks or some other animal-named civics association, gathering to sell expensive clothing and raffle tickets, congratulating ourselves on how nice we are."