A Quote by Jonathan Franzen
The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.
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If we actually thought about every decision we made, we'd be paralyzed ... You have to decide which decisions you're actually going to make, and then you have to let the rest of them go.
I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers
The second book, which was probably more from a professional standpoint - when I read Junot Díaz's Drown, I was like, Oh my god, you can write these stories and people will actually read them beyond your own little community. This guy's book is blowing up and it seems like [he's writing about] the neighborhood that I grew up in. That was a big deal. I read that in graduate school, so that's when I was really taking writing seriously, but I didn't know you could do it. I didn't know you can actually be an author. It was a weird epiphany.
But when you actually go in the ring, it's a very lonely and scary place. It's just you and the other guy.
People write because it seems like it'll be an easier job than carpet laying, that they might meet more girls. And they write because the world strikes them as being a marvelous place, and they want to keep bringing that to everybody's attention. You know ~ a scary place, a menacing place, an exciting place because it's scary and menacing. But mainly, kind of glorious.
Boxing is the toughest and loneliest sport in the world. You've got all the fans, lots of hangers-on jumping up and shouting different words. But when you actually go in the ring, it's a very lonely and scary place. It's just you and the other guy.
My revision methods are chipping things away and moving them around and trying to get things right. I'm also open in my own writing to failure. I want to fail. I want to go to a place where I don't know what I'm doing, where maybe I'm lost. And in that uncertain space, I make decisions, and I know all those decisions are going to change everything else. And at a certain point, you just come to a place of rest. In revising, you reduce your options so that nothing is possible, and you just think, I can't change this anymore because I've already passed that decision point.
Intuition is neither the ability to engage prophecy
nor a means of avoiding financial loss or painful relationships.
It is actually the ability to use energy data
to make decisions in the immediate moment.
I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.
I'd turn off the internet for a month and make us actually talk to each other, and be responsible for your opinions and not be able to hide behind the anonymity of the cyber-wall to speak your mind. To actually have to face people and see their reactions and discuss it - actually discuss it. It won't happen. Unless the grid goes down.
I do write nice songs about the guys who are nice to me! Eventually, I'm sure one of them will write a response - that's a pretty scary concept, actually! But I make sure I only write bad songs about the ones who deserve it.
Referees will make good decisions and bad ones. But when they make decisions actually affecting a game of football, it's disappointing.
People hate politicians, it's really in vogue right now to hate politicians, but we need someone to lead us into the new world economy, we actually need to make decisions and we actually need grownups.
Life is precious, so I ought to spend my days, you know, making sandwiches for homeless people and tending to the elderly in hospice care. Life is precious, so I should give everything away, except that I live in the world. And in the world, I actually have needs and wants, and I value my needs and wants. And I live in the world, and I can't just go make sandwiches every day because I also have to take kids to school. I also have to, you know, write books because that's my livelihood.
I wrote 'Song Like You' the day I recognized that someone who was really important to me was not actually very good for me, nor was I for them. I think we all have to make hard decisions like that at one point or another, having to let go of someone who we love because love isn't always enough to make it work.
Now that I'm almost forty, I look back at some of the decisions I made when I was younger - decisions that I thought of as courageous, or generous, or otherwise befitting a writer; befitting someone who had taken it as their life's goal to understand the human condition - and I wish I could go back in time and be like, "Hey, you don't actually have to do that - you're allowed to look out for yourself a little bit."
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