A Quote by David Sedaris
A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.
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I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.
I don't think of myself as Superman, but if a genie came up to me now and granted me a wish to take my legs back, for sure I would take them - but it would take some time to accept.
A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.
I am not going to do myself any good by coming back before I'm fully fit, so I will take my time and do what is best for me and my life.
I do for myself exactly what I would do for you - make a lovely cup of tea, or a hot bath, or go buy myself a fabulous pair of socks. I believe that you take the action, and THEN the insight follows - I do loving things for me, stroke my own shoulder, put myself down for a short nap, and the insight follows: that I am a wild precious woman, a human merely being, as e e cummings put it, deserving of respect, tenderness, protection, delight, and solidarity. And that is what Home looks like for me now.
One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.
The story of the memoir is a story of me creating certain narratives so that I could live with my own experience and with the uneasy relationship between what I was doing and what I believed in - or what I saw as an uneasy relationship between those two things.
Yesterday he told me he thought I would have to pretend to be weak, but he was wrong. I am weak already. I brace myself against the wall and press my forehead to my hands. It’s difficult to take deep breaths, so I take short, shallow ones. I can’t let this happen. They attacked me to make me feel weak. I can pretend they succeeded to protect myself, but I can’t let it become true.
There are ways of angling the camera. I don't just use a tripod. The only time I did that was in '88 when I first came out of detox, I spent every day doing self-portraits to fit back into my own skin. I didn't know what the world looked like - what I looked like - so in order to fit back into myself, I took self-portraits everyday to give myself courage and to fit the pieces back together. I used a tripod then.
Puma was a great fit for me. Obviously, they were looking for someone that was going to fit their brand, and I was looking to wear stuff that was going to fit me and not where I was going to go out and just blend in with everyone else. So it's been a great fit.
If I hold back any part of me, I suppress that much energy and potential. The question I want to ask myself now is not what behavior is good or bad, but in what ways would I express myself with greater energy if I didn't hold back.
You're punishing him over and over for things that are out of his control. Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't have a fully loaded weapon next to you round the clock. But I think it's time you flipped this little scenario in your head. If you'd been taken by the Capitol, and hijacked, and then tried to kill Peeta, is this the way he would be treating you?" demands Haymitch. I fall silent. It isn't. It isn't how he would be treating me at all. He would be trying to get me back at any cost. Not shutting me out, abandoning me, greeting me with hostility at every turn.
I directed one of my shorts that did festivals around the world, and that was great. I've got a bit of a bug for that now. I just hope I keep challenging myself and keep doing stuff that interests me with people who I respect and who teach me stuff. If I can keep doing that in anything - acting, writing, directing or whatever - I'll do it because life is short.
What I love about the 'Alien' franchise is I would do all kinds of films - dramas, comedies, whatever - and every now and then I'd be in this science fiction blockbuster that would re-introduce the character and me to a lot of audiences around the world and allow me to go back and do the smaller films again, so it was really a good balance for me.
Then I got a gig with an older friend who had the equipment and he played in this bar. They would bring me in the bar through the backdoor and I would DJ in the back room most of the night. Then they'd take me out the backdoor, so I was never really in the bar.
It's funny - for a long time, I didn't know I was writing a book. I was writing stories. For me, each story took so long and took so much out of me, that when I finished it, I was like, Oh my gosh, I feel like I've poured everything from myself into this, and then I'd get depressed for a week. And then once I was ready to write a new story, I would want to write about something that was completely different, so I would search for a totally different character with a different set of circumstances.
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