A Quote by Lydia Millet
I had hoped that going to Hiroshima would reveal something small, gritty, and precise to countervail the epic quality of historical accounts.
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I hoped to win a medal and hoped it would be gold. I knew I was good but didn't know I would be the one to score something that had never been done before.
I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.
I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something. In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important.
Look, I like gritty. I write gritty. There is a time and a place for gritty. I'll take my Batman gritty, thank you, and I will acknowledge that such a portrayal means that my 11-year-old has to wait before he sees The Dark Knight. But if Hollywood turns out a Superman movie that I can't take him to? They've done something wrong.
It's hard when you play something that people are like, 'Wow that's really cool - you just did something really epic,' because you're not always going to be playing epic characters in a role.
It was because of my deep concerns about nuclear weapons that I went to Hiroshima. And then I was astounded in Hiroshima to find that nobody had really studied it.
It's the quality of the ordinary, the straight, the square, that accounts for the great stability and success of our nation. It's a quality to be proud of. But it's a quality that many people seem to have neglected.
There are probably very few people who have not at some time of their lives had some quality of genius. If they have not had such, it is probable that they have also been without great sorrow or great pain. They would have needed only to live sufficiently intently for a time for some quality to reveal itself. The poems of first love are a case in point, and certainly such love is a sufficient stimulus.
I've had shows where, afterwards, people have commented or hoped I would talk more about something in politics or that I would make a joke about Mitch McConnell or something like that.
A small part of her secretly hoped she caught him in bed. But that really was a very small part. The bigger part hoped he was in the shower.
At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven. If so, I was going to reply, You know what? You're right. Fine.
I was first published in the newspaper put out by School of The Art Institute of Chicago, where I was a student. I wince to read that story nowadays, but I published it with an odd photo I'd found in a junk shop, and at least I still like the picture. I had a few things in the school paper, and then I got published in a small literary magazine. I hoped I would one day get published in The New Yorker, but I never allowed myself to actually believe it. Getting published is one of those things that feels just as good as you'd hoped it would.
I'm very conscious of trying to make something epic out of something small and ordinary.
With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.
The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker told me that his wife had passed away, and he had recently suffered a heart attack, and now he hoped that he would die within the year. I learned that there's no reliable small talk in America; at any moment a conversation can become personal.
To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality without a name. There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.
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