“If you read someone else's
diary, you get what you deserve.”
“A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.”
“At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.”
“Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.”
“When forced to leave my
house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and
together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The
laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and
open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the
typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the
sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon.
It’s a typewriter,’
I say. ‘You use it to write angry letters to airport security.”
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