T.C. Boyle quotes:

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share
  • First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can't see or hear or smell or taste, you have something.

  • I'd read somewhere that nine out of ten adults in Alaska had a drinking problem. I could believe it. Snow, ice, sleet, wind, the dark night of the soul: what else were you supposed to do?

  • There are always surprises. Life may be inveterately grim and the surprises disproportionately unpleasant, but it would be hardly worth living if there were no exceptions, no sunny days, no acts of random kindness.

  • Alcohol had a lot to do with it, too, and mental instability. All writers are narcissistic, manic-depressive drug addicts and alcoholics, and I am no exception.

  • I'm just having fun making jokes and writing books. But you see me once a year, I come on when I have a new book out, but basically, I've got my nose to the grindstone and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do in life, which is make stories.

  • If I'm doing my job correctly, I'm presenting a scenario for you as the reader to engage with on your own. I mean that's what the best art is supposed to do.

  • A glad zest and hopefulness might be inspired even in the most jaded and ennui-cursed, were there in our homes such simple, truthful natures as that of my heroine, and it is in the sphere of quiet homes-not elsewhere-I believe that a woman can best rule and save the world.

  • I think if you read all my books you know where I stand, pretty much. You could probably give the reader a questionnaire and they could figure out what I'm about. But I don't think my job is to tell you that.

  • These occasions always took him by surprise. He was shocked anew each time the crisply surveyed, neatly kept world he so cherished rose up to confront him with all its essential sloppiness, irrationality, and bad business sense.

  • Some writers just write about their own lives. Well, I don't want to do that. I want to have a really boring life. A quiet, boring life so no one wants to write a biography. I'm the only writer in history only to have one wife, for instance.

  • In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of life." (Barnes & Noble Review, email dialogue with Cameron Martin, Feb. 09, 2009)

  • Basically for me a story can be anything. Anything you tell me, anything I read in the newspaper, in any mode. I don't have any restrictions.

  • But then, that's the beauty of writing stories-each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there's no feeling like it.

  • All writers are egomaniacal, manic-depressive, drug-addicted alcoholics. You want to have that fix again.

  • I'm sad that there no more mysterious places in the world.

  • We are animals and we are made in this way and this is how we behave. I'm just kind of fascinated by how we can deny that we are animals and what our impact on the other animals is like, and how quixotic we can be in trying to assess what we've done in trying to correct it.

  • He regarded marriage as an arbitrary and essentially adversarial relationship, akin to the yoking of prisoners on the chain gang.

  • I was reading, absorbed in an assault on K2 by a team of Japanese mountaineers, my lungs constricting in the thin burning air, the deadly sting of wind-lashed ice in my face, when the record -- Le Sacre du Printemps -- caught in the groove with a gnashing squeal as if a stageful of naiads, dryads and spandex satyrs had simultaneously gone lame."

  • A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new.

  • Any story has a beginning, middle, and end, of course, but the question is, where do you start it exactly? It's about a guy who is murdered in a fistfight, but how does it evolve and what does it mean? That's what I discovered scene by scene, and this innovation of coming in as a first-person narrator was a complete surprise to me. It just happened.

  • At best, I consider flying an unavoidable necessity, a time to resurrect forgotten prayers and contemplate the end of all joy in a twisted howling heap of machinery; at worst, I rank it right up there with psychotic episodes and torture at the hands of malevolent strangers.

  • Criticism can be wonderful, especially in making connections in an interpretive way. But by applying theories randomly, it's an interesting exercise, but I don't think it illuminates the literature.

  • Especially students. I love to turn them on to a story. Some of them have to go see me as an assignment, like kids from the schools in New York will go to the Y. I want them to know why I love this and why they should too.

  • Everything we do is escapism, because we'll all be dead and everything we do is completely meaningless. Why brush your teeth? Why not be in the park with the bums passing a short dog? Why pay taxes, why get educated? Of course literature is an escape. You have to fill the hours.

  • From my point of view, why shouldn't I work in every possible mode, to see if it's viable? "Los Gigantes" would not have worked as a straightforward, naturalistic tale. Part of the fun of it is that it's so preposterous and yet at the same time, it could have happened. Think of eugenics. Hitler certainly would have been doing it if he could have.

  • I always dread the process of writing because I'm not a writer. I'm an audible guy, I'm a verbal guy. I love to talk. I write a book every couple years, but it just takes everything out of me to get a book out.

  • I always listen to music while I'm working and I always read aloud to my wife. I love to read aloud to an audience because there's a cadence and a beat. There's a music to the language that's very important to me.

  • I can't be reading novels when I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in. The hardest thing to do is keep the tone and your attitude over the course of a year or however long it takes.But when I'm writing short stories, which I will be doing shortly, I can read anything I like.

  • I don't know who they are[my characters] . They're entirely invented characters. Maybe that's how I've been able to write so many books, because there are no boundaries for me. I can write a completely fantastical story like "Swept Away" or "Blinded by the Light" and then a non-comic drama like "Chicxulub" or something like "Birnam Wood" that has autobiographical underpinnings. Why not?

  • I don't think we need a critic to negotiate with the audience. People say, "Who are you writing for?" I'm writing for myself but my audience is anybody who knows how to read. I think a story should engage anybody who knows how to read. And I hope that my stories do, maybe on a different level for more sophisticated readers than, say, a high school kid, but still a story has got to grab you. That's why we read it.

  • I go around with my books so much and I love to perform on stage, to remind everybody that the lights are off, the phones are off, and for this hour, it's going to be like your mother reading to you. We're going to remember why we love stories. I think that gets lost in over-intellectualizing.

  • I have an idea and a first line -- and that suggests the rest of it. I have little concept of what I'm going to say, or where it's going. I have some idea of how long it's going to be -- but not what will happen or what the themes will be. That's the intrigue of doing it -- it's a process of discovery. You get to discover what you're going to say and what it's going to mean.

  • I have many enemies and they all think I'm being highfalutin calling it performance, but the word "reading" has a connotation of something academic with the lights on and you're going to get a lecture. I'm looking to blow my audiences away by giving a fine, dramatic performance and reminding them of why they love stories.

  • I have very rarely written autobiographical stuff. "Greasy Lake" and some other works have some autobiographical elements, as does "Birnam Wood," the one I chose to end [this collection] with. I lived in that house and some of my feelings are expressed in it, but it's not autobiography. It was not me and that didn't happen exactly that way.

  • I like to joke that you usually write more books before death than after death, so that's why I'm doing it. But really, I remain engaged with ideas. There are so many things happening that turn me on and I just want to examine them.

  • I love satire. Evelyn Waugh is one of my favorite writers of all time. He's hilarious. He's so wicked. He's so great. On the other hand, pure satire is an imitation. It doesn't really have any heart. It only holds things up to ridicule.

  • I think it's a great thing to hear the author reading. I've listened to CDs of Cheever and Updike reading their stories and Hemingway. To hear what their voices were like is amazing. Whether they're reading well or not, it's great to listen to the intonation and the beat of the guy who wrote the story.

  • I was joking earlier when I said that all writers are manic depressives, but it's a joke with a lot of truth behind it. For fiction writers and poets, too, there's something wrong with you and you do this art as a way of correcting it or addressing it in some way.

  • If you focus on literature through only one small element of it, like the more scientific element of linguistics, then where is the joy that brought us literature in the first place, which is to have a story?

  • I'm a product of state schools. I had a working-class family. We had no books. I was the first to go to college. But I didn't really think about it, or about making money. I was just going to be an artist, and I've been fortunate. I've never had to work for anybody nor have I had to write for money. Maybe that's another reason that I've been able to be productive. I haven't had to use my writing to make a living.

  • I'm always trying to do something different and trying to keep myself amused.

  • I'm extremely worried. I'm worried about the survival of our species, worried about what we're doing, worried about being Americans, worried about depletion of resources. On the other hand, we are trying. We are trying to understand our impact on the environment.

  • I'm pretty hardcore. I stick exactly to what I'm doing. So I write a novel in one period, and then I'll write stories in another period. I only work on one thing at once, because I'm afraid that I wouldn't finish what I'd started.

  • I've always been a huge fan of theatre and performance. The idea of just the human voice and just this night. Live music is the same. They're doing it for you right now. It's an amazing thing. And if you perform a story properly, it can be a transporting, too.

  • I've been in perfect health and perfectly happy all my life. I don't take any pills; I just get up, clean up after my wife, and start typing every day.

  • I've had many students over the years, sometimes even very sophisticated students, who will be writing and will hit a wall. Often I find it's because they're working out of sequence. Maybe some people can do that, but I don't think that's how fiction works. It's a discovery.

  • Music is, by far, the best art. Nothing even comes close. It's so immediate and emotional. In writing, maybe ninety percent of it is the unconscious and ten percent is control. In music, I think it's probably more like ninety-nine percent the unconscious. It's just a beautiful thing happening through you. And so, too, is writing a great story.

  • Nothing moves around, it just goes straight from the start to the end. The final draft on the final day, that's it, same for the novels. What I turn in is what you see. There are some exceptions, but almost always I can see exactly what it's going to be.

  • One of the problems I have with many writers is their stories are all somewhat similar. They might be very good, but they're always on the same turf. I don't have those limitations.

  • Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain.

  • Sometimes, when she's out here alone, she can feel the pulse of something bigger, as if all things animate were beating in unison, a glory and a connection that sweeps her out of herself, out of her consciousness, so that nothing has a name, not in Latin, not in English, not in any known language.

  • The hardest part is always the middle of anything because at that point, on some unconscious level, you have to figure out what it's about and why you're doing it and what it means. You don't know that in the beginning.

  • The hardest thing in a novel is time. You've got [a line like] "two weeks later, he woke up with a headache," and you've got to add up that entire two weeks and what the date is and whether it works. That kind of stuff drives me crazy and if I don't have it exactly right, I can't move forward because I don't feel confident.

  • The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don't know and find something out. And it works.

  • The reason we love nature is because it's fascinating and we love all the creatures, but if you watch any nature film, there's always a lesson: "the creatures are all dying and life sucks." The same is true of literature.

  • The very genetic determinism I posited in World's End as a way of shaking off my inherited demons is being proven in fact as we map out the human genome.

  • There's a kind of mystery to our being and from my point of view, regarding my own parents and their parents, I'd as soon let it lie than find out who my mother's father was.

  • They [my stories] evolve. If they're tightly constructed, it's because they're revised constantly as I move forward each day. That's where the structure inheres. It's all organic.

  • To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of man.

  • We live in a cluttered culture, a culture of information in which even our computers can't tell us what's worth knowing and what is merely cultural scrap. In such a society, we don't have the experience of contemplative space, of the time or mood to engage a book of poetry or even read a novel. Who can achieve the unconscious-conscious state of the reader when everything is stimulation, everything is movement and information?

  • We've all had the experience of you pick up a book, you can't get into it, you can't concentrate.Then one day you pick up the same book and you don't hear the phone ring. You're totally absorbed. Same thing I have to do every day. When you get into that special place of unconsciousness - you get it listening to great music or seeing a great movie - it just takes you out of yourself, out of this whole world. There's no feeling quite like it.

  • What I'm doing is exploring things. This is why I'm a fiction writer rather than an essayist or a politician or whatever. I just gather material and find a scenario, and see where it takes me. I don't have a plan.

  • When you're in the midst of writing, it's a beautiful thing happening through you. Many people have said that it's not you, it's the soul of humankind and so on, I don't know. But it has the same effect [as music]. It takes you out of your body and out of this planet.

  • Work ethic and this determination is all part of escaping the depressive side. Of course I'm manic depressive, maybe not to the degree that Exley was, but I think all writers are. There are highs and lows. Look at David Foster Wallace.

  • Work saved me. Literature saved me. It sounds corny but it's absolutely true. I was going in the wrong direction, but after the 9,000th night at the bar doing dope with a bunch of Dead Heads, I began to think there was something more.

  • Writing is a channeling of an individual experience; so is reading. That's what's so exciting about this art form - it's interactive.

  • You don't write the kitchen scene just because you're eager to do it that day and you're avoiding something else. I think it has to move slowly, step by step. I pride myself on the construction of my stories but it's not something I impose on them.

  • You're not getting the joy out of literature that it gave you. This is the danger of what we do. Look at Hemingway and so many others. You devote your life to one thing, that is what you are. It's artificial but it's all you have. If you lose it, then you're nothing and there's no point in going on.

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share