Life Is Fundamentally Up For Grabs

A Reader, Encountering A Sentence About A Barking Dog, Would Have To Dwell On Why That Choice Was Made At That Moment. Everything In A Novel Is Explicitly Chosen, Whereas Some Of What A Film Captures Feels Incidental, According To The Vagaries Of Photography And Sound Recording.

Being Blocked, Being Uncertain, Sitting There Not Knowing, Waiting, Abiding With It: This Is The Work. If You Don't Have The Tolerance For That You're In Great Trouble. If You Want To Call It A Writer's Block... That Doesn't Seem A Very Useful Name For That Kind Of Abiding That I Think Is The Essence Of The Work.

Art Is About Eliminating Almost Everything In Order To Focus On The Thing That You Need To Talk About.

There Were Days When No Kid Came Out Of His House Without Looking Around. The Week After Halloween Had A Quality Both Hungover And Ominous, The Light Pitched, The Sky Smashed Against The Rooftops.

Poetry Is Supposed To Be Musical. But People Don't Understand Prose. They're So Used To Reading Journalism - Clunky, Functional Sentences That Convey Factual Information - Facts, More Than Just The Surfaces Of Things.