I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.
Obama was the first president whose biography makes sense to me. He can walk into a room anywhere and find common ground with any person.
For me, the ages between 9 and 12 were great because it was before you wore any masks, and you had some autonomy in the world. You had some freedom, and you felt you had unlimited ambition. It's when you thought, 'I'm going to write plays. I'm going to be president. I'm going to do this; I'm going to do that.' And then it all falls apart.
For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.
Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged.
If you're rich, you can leave a library, a building, or a hospital wing. But writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it meant for someone to be human.
A painting lets us know how somebody literally saw things. A piece of music is another language that transmits a whole wealth of emotion and wordless experience. But writing is special in the way at allows us to temporarily enter another person's world, to step outside the boundaries of our own time and space.
When you're a kid, and someone is your best friend, you almost don't need words. It's almost like puppies in a - frolicking in a garden or something. You don't articulate stuff. You just live it.
I remember laughing so hard as a kid.
I wish I were a really good photographer.
The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling.
This sense in which so much of who we are doesn't break the surface - our knowability to one another is always something I like to explore.
I have said it somewhere - our literary lived lives are as important as our literally lived lives.
The relevant question isn't, 'Is this a potential friend for me?' but, 'Is this character alive?'
When I am teaching, I first give out Tolstoy's 'Childhood,' his first published book. It is so transparent. It gives you exactly what it was like to be on a Russian estate in 1830. You are there. And that is the hope when you sit down and write still, I think - that you can transmit something of what life is like now.
If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be.
The people who don't read - who are they? How do they make sense of things?
There's this moment when kids realize that they have power and that they can use it.
I'm a different person in French. I'm a different person in New York. I'm a different person in Canada.
Sometimes I think about all the hours spent making lunches, carting kids from one place to another, being up in the middle of the night taking temperatures. People who haven't had to do that have, say, read every last book up there from cover to cover and probably remember it. There are trade-offs. But more life is more life.
