Novelists From California

"I love Armenian people — all of them. I love them because they are a part of the enormous human race, which of course I find simultaneously beautiful and vulnerable."

"It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give."

"There was a touch of anxiety in the whole human race about its future."

"There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia. There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth."

"A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography."

"I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose history is ended, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, whose literature is unread, whose music is unheard, whose prayers are no longer uttered. Go ahead, destroy this race. Let us say that it is again 1915. There is war in the world. Destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them from their homes into the desert. Let them have neither bread nor water. Burn their houses and their churches. See if they will not live again. See if they will not laugh again. See if the race will not live again when two of them meet in a beer parlor, twenty years later, and laugh, and speak in their tongue. Go ahead, see if you can do anything about it. See if you can stop them from mocking the big ideas of the world, you sons of bitches, a couple of Armenians talking in the world, go ahead and try to destroy them."

"I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death."

"I have been to the place, Armenia. There is no nation there, but that is all the better. But I have been to that place, and I know this: that there is no nation in the world, no England and France and Italy, and no nation whatsoever."

"My birthplace was California, but I couldn't forget Armenia, so what is one's country? Is it land of the earth, in a specific place? Rivers there? Lakes? The sky there? The way the moon comes up there? And the sun? Is one's country the trees, the vineyards, the grass, the birds, the rocks, the hills and summer and winter? Is it the animal rhythm of the living there? The huts and houses, the streets of cities, the tables and chairs, and the drinking of tea and talking? Is it the peach ripening in summer heat on the bough? Is it the dead in the earth there?"

"My uncle jumped up from the desk, loving him more than he loved any other man in the world, and through him loving the lost nation, the multitude dead, and the multitude living in every alien corner of the world."

"When Andranik went away... I saw that tears were in his eyes and his mouth was twisting with agony like the mouth of a small boy who is in great pain but will not let himself cry."

"It's all over. We can begin to forget Armenia now. Andranik is dead. The nation is lost. I'm no Armenian. I'm an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this: an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are. I tried to forget Armenia but I couldn't do it."

"You write a hit play the same way you write a flop."

"The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness."

"I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things."

"I care so much about everything that I care about nothing."

"The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business."

"My superficial manners stink and my profound manners are almost as bad."

"All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too."

"The wind shows us how close to the edge we are"

"with Didion I really just feel moral, political, stylistic differences. People think she's such a great stylist, but I don't. I think she's sentimental. I mean, she doesn't overwrite. She doesn't do that at all. I will say that for her. But I don't like her attitude towards people, you know. I don't think she really illuminates them but darkens them so that we see them less by the time we're through. Maybe in the beginning we see them a little bit but by the end we really don't see them. And I don't think she wants us to. And I think that's a political thing."

"("Who are some of the women writers around who are not feminists, who are simply writers, or even doing a disservice to the feminist cause?") I think an example would be Joan Didion. First, I have to say I dislike the word cause. I think she does a disservice to the feminist cause, to any progressive cause, and also to the clarity of language. I've read a couple of her books. I don't know anything about her except she's from California. Well, I mean, so is Tillie. Just goes to show. I think her style is very... sentimental really. And indirect and opaque."

"...anxiety was her schtick. She applies her anxiety to everything. And when she’s got it in balance it's brilliant. And when she doesn’t, when her anxiety becomes the subject, it’s lousy."

"Her nonfiction is so compelling. She finds exactly the right words that she needs to establish setting and character and not one word more."

"Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout."

"When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges."

"Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned."

"In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space."

"Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power."

"A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image."

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

"One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me."

"Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?"

"The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs."

"Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price."

"Writers are always selling somebody out."

"I have gone to the set and you’re kind of around in this—it’s kind of combat writing when you do rewriting and stuff, and I feel like it’s a kind of ambulance chasing. Recently, I did this kind of a (laughing) where you go, “Oh, my God, it’s bleeding from the second act. Quick! Quick! Give me a suture! No, give me the paddles! This is the third act that’s having a heart attack!! The star is coming! The star is coming!" And it's this incredibly intense process!"

"Ms. Fisher established Princess Leia as a damsel who could very much deal with her own distress, whether facing down the villainy of the dreaded Darth Vader or the romantic interests of the roguish smuggler Han Solo. ... Winning the admiration of countless fans, Ms. Fisher never played Leia as helpless. She had the toughness to escape the clutches of the monstrous gangster Jabba the Hutt and the tenderness to tell Han Solo, as he is about to be frozen in carbonite, “I love you.”"

"It was one movie [[Star Wars (film)|[Star Wars]]]. It wasn't supposed to do what it did—nothing was supposed to do that. Nothing ever had. Movies were meant to stay on the screen, flat and large and colorful, gathering you up into their sweep of story, carrying you rollicking along to the end, then releasing you back into your unchanged life. But this movie misbehaved. It leaked out of the theater, poured off the screen, affected a lot of people so deeply that they required endless talismans and artifacts to stay connected to it."

"I have to start by telling you that my entire existence can be summed up in one phrase. And that is: If my life wasn't funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable."

"I love what speed and coke do to my weight. It's unnatural, I know. I could just exercise. ..."

"That's the way it works in movies," said Suzanne. "Something happens that has an impact on someone's life, and based on that impact, his life shifts course. Well, that's not how it happens in life. Something has an impact on you, and then your life stays the same, and you think, 'Well, what about the impact?' You have epiphanies all the time. They just don't have any effect."

"Instant gratification takes too long."

"I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art."

"Things are getting worse faster than I can lower my standards."

"I Googled myself without lubricant. I don't recommend it."

"I slept with some nerd. I hope it was George [Lucas]. I took too many drugs to remember."

"Mostly, you write a script and someone’s gonna rewrite you. They get hundreds of—not hundred but they get ten writers to write something. If you have a big budget, you can go and get a lot of people to write on script .... I just actually heard that somebody said, 'Well, your screenplay got bought and now someone like Carrie Fisher will come in and rewrite you.' And I feel terrible, you know, because that’s not what I mean to do. My idea was never to raid something and trash it, you know. ‘Cause that – that’s more work for me!"