Everyone desires to laugh sometimes, and I want to make that available.
There has to be space for play in literature. We all need some breathing room.
It's a friendly act to write a lighthearted book.
Marriage is like the romantic ideal, and yet the trappings around it and the culture about it are really the opposite of that.
There is a lot of contradictions of mermaids as a symbol. I'm always interested in contradictions.
The Free Body Culture gave me a gift I might never have received had I refused to play along. It left me with an acute sense of the absurd - one I still cherish - to be there among my fellow apes, awkward and less than half-willing, aiming and missing, leaping, landing and wincing.
I came to understand that a German nudist, in 1984, loved little more than to work on his or her tan.
I worry about the very pernicious way we elevate and separate ourselves from other beasts, the way we rationalize our comfort and ease, our worship of the self, as healthy. It's enticing, but with a terrible taint of evil.
I used to try to write around the edges, but now I try to walk a more direct line.
I love irony.
I think the best fiction is a form of psychological suspense, even though I don't really write in that idiom.
Do we seek delicate phraseology in politics or other forms of public life? We do not.
We paint a slow picture. You can see the brushstrokes. We don't get to the point, and sometimes when we do, our readers don't notice, in fact. It's so couched in nuance, it can fly right over a person's head. 'What was that you said? I couldn't quite make it out.'
At writing workshops, they taught us to show, not tell - well, showing takes time.
In Hiroshima, bombed Aug. 6, 1945, no warning was given of the air attack, and thus no escape was possible for the mostly women, children and old people who fell victim.
In Nagasaki, American planes did drop warning leaflets - but not till Aug. 10, a day after the city was bombed.
I had hoped that going to Hiroshima would reveal something small, gritty, and precise to countervail the epic quality of historical accounts.
The summer after I got divorced, my children asked to sleep in my bed again. It would be the first time we'd shared a bed since they were infants.
I have a king bed, one of those memory-foam mattresses that doesn't jiggle as you get in or out. Even if you cleaved it down the middle with a pickax, the thing wouldn't tremble. It's practically earthquake-proof.
I can be pretty dense about my own basic needs, when my focus is getting through the many small tasks of a day's work and a day's caretaking.
