All art is theft.
A major focus of 'Reality Hunger' is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it.
In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible.
One of my clearest, happiest memories is of myself at fourteen, sitting up in bed, being handed a large glass of warm buttermilk by my mother because I had a sore throat, and she saying how envious she was that I was reading 'The Catcher in the Rye' for the first time.
Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating.
I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.
The trajectory of nearly all technology follows this downward and widening path: by the time a regular person is able to create his own TV network, it doesn't matter anymore that I have or am on a network.
In a way, it's taken me 25 years to acknowledge that I am from the West Coast. I was always sort of pretending I was bicoastal or that I really belonged on the East Coast.
The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.
I worry that I am not really a person anymore: I'm more of just a writing machine. I wonder what that has done to either my life and or my art.
All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.
I think there are people who are born storytellers. I think of someone like T. C. Boyle or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think really, without putting any pejorative on it, they're like carnival barkers, 'Come into the tent, and I'll tell you this story.'
Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat.
When I was studying at the Iowa Writers School, I read a sports writer, Ron Maly, from the Des Moines Register. He was a good sports writer. I became real interested in the contrast between Lute Olson, who was the coach of Iowa at the time, and Ron Maly.
I began as a fiction writer - I had written three novels in my 20s and 30s. But as my work has gravitated towards literary nonfiction, or lyric essay or poetic essay, whatever you want to call it, I'm constantly beating my head against the wall 'cause I'm teaching a genre that's no longer that exciting to me and that I'm no longer practicing.
I like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture - the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers - books still make sense.
I'm not super-polite or civil - I try to be civil, but I'm not into Seattle's niceties, and I'm not hugely wired into Seattle's natural beauty.
I still see life entirely through its Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects of writing 'The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead', and I find I can't.
The N.C.A.A. is a multibillion-dollar business built on the talents of players who are often unqualified for or uninterested in being students and who benefit materially from the system only if they are among the few who turn professional.
