As A Writer, One Is

You Can See That The Care He Took Defiling The Beauty He Had Forced In Them Was As Precise And Clean As His Good Hands Which At Night Had Developed The Negatives, Floating The Sheets In The Correct Acids And Watching The Faces And Breasts And Pubic Triangles And Sofas Emerge. The Making And Destroying Coming From The Same Source, Same Lust, Same Surgery His Brain Was Capable Of. (on New Orleans Photographer E. J. Bellocq)

…even The Idea Of A City Never Entered His Mind. It Was As If He Had Walked Under The Millimeter Of Haze Just Above The Inked Fibers Of A Map, That Pure Zone Between Land And Chart, Between Distances And Legends, Between Nature And Storyteller. The Place They Had Chosen To Come To, To Be Their Best Selves, To Be Unconscious Of Ancestry. Here, Apart From The Sun Compass And The Odometer Mileage, And The Book, He Was Alone, His Own Invention. He Knew During These Times How The Mirage Worked, The Fata Morgana, For He Was Within It.

One Of The Things That Happens In Novels It's Almost Like A Continual Debate With Yourself. That's Why You're Writing The Book. It's Why You Create Characters: So You Can Argue With Yourself.

I Love The Performance Of A Craft, Whether It Is Modest Or Mean-spirited, Yet I Walk Away When Discussions Of It Begin - As If One Should Ask A Gravedigger What Brand Of Shovel He Uses Or Whether He Prefers To Work At Noon Or In Moonlight. I Am Interested Only In The Care Taken, And Those Secret Rehearsals Behind It. Even If I Do Not Understand Fully What Is Taking Place.

In Sri Lanka A Well-told Lie Is Worth A Thousand Facts.