A Quote by Richard Powers
I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.
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The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.
It takes courage to reinvent joys, to reinvent opportunities, to reinvent dreams, to reinvent connections, to reinvent hopes that you have set aside.
Do you know how many times my career has been close to rock bottom? Each time, I was like, 'Girl, figure it out. Reinvent yourself.'
Far superior to the pleasures and rewards of the illusion that is Earthly life are the pleasure and rewards of the Reality.
Writing a novel isn't like building a brick wall. You don't figure out how to do it, and then it gets easier each time because you know what you're doing. With writing a novel, you have to figure it out each time. Each time you start over, you just have the language and the idea and the hope.
I am saying what comes out, because I'm really not a methodical writer. I'm not a good building writer, where you are like "well, I going to make a song today, and I think it will be a pop song." Some people are great at it and it's beautiful. If I am feeling musical and I pick up the guitar, usually something will eventually come out and I'll see where it goes.
[Eugene] O'Neill made a living, certainly, at least. But each of these forms have sort of died the death in turn, and it's a simple fact of that universe that talent then migrates away from these forms, and then the amateurs get in, like lunatics in the ruins, sort of pretending to be artists. If you're ambitious enough to want to be a writer to begin with, you want to be a writer in some circumstances where there are rewards, where there's notice, where you don't have to be a teacher, and where you're frankly not nuts for wasting your time.
There is not a little generalship and stratagem required in the managing and marshalling of our pleasures, so that each shall not mutually encroach to the destruction of all. For pleasures are very voracious, too apt to worry one another, and each, like Aaron's serpent, is prone to swallow up the rest. Thus drinking will soon destroy the power, gaming the means, and sensuality the taste, for other pleasures less seductive, but far more salubrious, and permanent as they are pure.
It is often a mistake to combine two pleasures, because pleasures, like pains, can act as counter-irri-tants to each other.
Do you know how many times my career has been close to rock bottom? Each time, I was like, 'Girl, figure it out. Reinvent yourself.' Just the other day, I was having lunch with my mom, and she said, 'You've taught me so much. You are so resilient.'
The meaningful work and the meaningful relationships are, to me, comparable rewards. I think being on a mission to do something great is great, and to be on that mission with people who you have really meaningful relationships with not only provides both types of rewards, but it's mutually supportive. Because you can have tough love, but there's also the love part of that in terms of the caring for each other, and when you have the caring you can be tougher on each other. Some people describe it as an intellectual Navy Seals.
I am not a political writer. I agree with Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, who are social writers. I can't write in that fashion. I am not good enough for that. What I am interested in is family dramas and why we are doing bad things to each other and what our motives are.
I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.
Work, especially if you're lucky in what you do, is one of the great pleasures of life, but - like all pleasures - it can become selfish.
If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.
I'm never doing anything by rote. I'm only on thin ice, and I think that that's a good place to be. I feel like when you push yourself like that, the rewards can be pretty great.
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