A Quote by Mark Helprin
I wrote a great deal of a novel, 'Winter's Tale,' on the roof of a Brooklyn Heights tenement on Henry Street. I was a technical climber, and now and then I would put down my manuscript and get up to walk along parapets and climb walls and chimneys.
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I have never understood, for example, how come a child can climb up on the roof, scale the TV antenna, and rescue the cat ... yet cannot walk down the hallway without grabbing both walls with his grubby hands for balance.
Those who have experienced a great deal of violence or committed a great deal of violence themselves, those who are existing in their own world of sadness and malevolence, essentially those are the ones that are most prone to possession. You don't just walk down the street and suddenly you get possessed. It creeps up on you.
My dressing room was right on the water, and I would climb out of my window and walk around on the roof, whenever I needed time to think, or whenever I couldn't get a scene together. My father even came out there on the roof with me. We just walked around and talked up there, just to get away from everything, and nobody could get to us there. I really do love that place very much. It holds a very deep-rooted place in my heart.
Anything, even the conceptually most complex material, can be written for general audiences without any dumbing down. Of course you have to explain things carefully. This goes back to Galileo, who wrote his great books as dialogues in Italian, not as treatises in Latin. And to Darwin, who wrote The Origin of Species for general readers. I think a lot of people pick up Darwin's book and assume it must be a popular version of some technical monograph, but there is no technical monograph. That's what he wrote. So what I'm doing is part of a great humanistic tradition.
Walking the streets on winter nights kept him warm, despite the cold nocturnal passions of uprising winds. His footsteps led between trade-marked houses, two up and two down, with digital chimneys like pigs' tits on the rooftops sending up heat and smoke into the cold trough of a windy sky. Stars hid like snipers, taking aim now and again when clouds gave them a loophole. Winter was an easy time for him to hide his secrets, for each dark street patted his shoulder and became a friend, and the gaseous eye of each lamp glowed unwinking as he passed.
It was great growing up in Brooklyn. The neighborhood was the street. Everybody would get together after school. Somebody would sit out on a stoop and then five other people, 10 other people would come out - a game of stickball or stoopball or dodgeball - all revolved around a basketball or dodgeball. We had fun.
I think it is quite wrong to photograph, for example, Garbo, if she doesn't want to be photographed. Now I would have loved to photograph her, but she obviously didn't want to be photographed so I didn't follow it up. Then somebody will photograph her walking down the street because she has to walk down the street, and I mind that sort of intrusion. I think this is horrible.
The philosophy of individualism owes a great deal to the tradition of novel-writing and novel-reading. In its development and in its aesthetics, the novel is not politically neutral; it has been a participant in history all along.
Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
People speaking into handheld devices while they walk down the street and saying to the device, "I'm walking down the street now." People are enslaved. I was just up in the country for a few days last week and it was great: no television, no telephone, no nothing. I walked through the woods, sat around, smoked. And it was lovely. I think the desire to be free has mutated, and we now live in an era when the slaves celebrate their slavery - this whole corporate concept of being part of a "team" at work.
Things happen along the way in our path. Instead of looking at it as a wall that's being put up in front of us, look at it as as opportunity to scale new heights and to climb that wall - to see and do things you didn't think you were capable of.
A climb-out fight is where you climb a building. You climb fire escapes. You climb to the top of the building. You fight on the roof, and you fight all the way down again.
I may climb perhaps to no great heights, but I will climb alone.
I am trying different styles, and while you can't climb a tree or jump on a crocodile in a dress, it is nice to get dressed up every now and then and kind of walk away from the khaki for a moment.
I used to walk down the street like I was a super star... I want people to walk around delusional about how great they can be - and then to fight so hard for it every day that the lie becomes the truth.
When you're down, when you've been kicked down in the street and then kicked a few more times until you're bleeding and your teeth are out, then you only have up to go. You get reborn again, and expectations aren't so great because they've taken you away. It's beautiful to be down there. It's so beautiful!
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