The belief when your mother gives you away is that there's something deeply wrong. Mothers don't give babies away. There's something wrong with me, something unlovable, something seriously flawed in me. It's a fundamental thing; it's precognitive. You feel it rather than think it. How could you not?
I respond very well to rules. If there are certain parameters it's much easier to do something really good. Especially when readers know what those are. They know what to expect and then you have to wrong-foot them. That is the trick of crime fiction. And readers come to crime and graphic novels wanting to be entertained, or disgusted.
And the writers are good in that it's easy to memorize, and good writing has an innate rhythm to it. And I've always felt that it's easier to get in your head than writing that has very kind of mind busting moments.
Sometimes you can fix something that went wrong with what you do next and make it better than it would have been if it hadn't gone wrong, as an improviser, and I do know how to do that.
I know a lot of crime writers feel very underrated, like they're not taken seriously, and they want to be just thought of as writers rather than ghettoised as crime writers, but I love being thought of firmly as a crime writer.
People probably long for something genuinely personal in a society where the personal is often indistinguishable from the "personalized." Maybe the poetry audience member is searching for his or her own "personal space" and they expect the poet to be a sort of avatar of the private life. But that sort of representation is distasteful to me. Asking a poet to represent the personal life is, paradoxically, to turn the poet into something other than a person.
The gourney, the big file drawers of the dead, the instruments of dissection - this sure looked like the morgues in the movies. Something had gone seriously wrong while she slept.
Those of us referred to food banks are the lucky ones with a good doctor or health visitor who knows us well enough to recognise that something has gone seriously wrong.
If you don't find that people find you're easier to live with than you were before, if you don't find that your heart is feeling warmer toward others and if your negative emotions are not getting any better, then there's something wrong. That is always the touchstone of the Dharma practice.
If you cannot bore your friends to death about your own small business, then something is seriously wrong.
I think life would be a lot easier if people were able to stand in their mistakes and not backtrack. If you did something wrong, own it. Like, hold your own.
All my businesses are scrupulously legal. Not because I have any moral problems with crime. It just makes my life easier to obey the law. Crime is for poor people; you don't need to rob the bank if you own it.
Its a really wonderful thing to focus your life on something other than your own personal career and ambition.
It's a really wonderful thing to focus your life on something other than your own personal career and ambition.
My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.
And freedom comes with grace, kindness, understanding, and love. Don't take anything personal, folks. Whatever is said about you or rumored or you heard something - you haven't done anything wrong and it's not your fault. That is your own self-invisible anchor that will stop your boat of life from going forward.