 Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions. |
| I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about. |
| When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises. |
| I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their own non-existence for the people who are supposed to care most for them. |
| I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid. |
| I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie. |
| A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They'll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing. |
| Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it. |
| You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really don't know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next. |
| If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke. |
| If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life. |
| Usually by the time I finish a book tour I've just about had it with the book. |
| I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long. |
| You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel. |
| My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination. |
| I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges. |
| HBO is really famous for hiring good people and staying out of their way until they ask for help, or need it. And that reputation is earned. |
| When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again. |
| When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while. |
| It's no secret that in my books I'm trying to make the comic and the serious rub up against each other just as closely and uncomfortably as I can. |
