[Amy Pascal, co-chairman of Sony Pictures] asked if I wanted to play a Bond girl. I said, “No, I’m not comfortable with that, but I would like to play Bond.”
Category Archives: Quotes
You only need to tell your story
My writing students have been bringing family images to my memoir class for 20 years. They are mainly women, painfully eager to know how to use writing to make sense of their life narrative–who they are, who they once were, what heritage they were born into–and they are immobilized by the size of the task. Where to start? Where to stop? What to put in? What to leave out? How to find the story’s proper shape and sequence? How to deal equitably with all that is still unreconciled…
I sympathize with their despair; there’s just much too much stuff in the cluttered attic of memory. I can only offer one word of salvation: Reduce! You must decide what is primary and what is secondary. You’re not required to tell everybody’s story; you only need to tell your story. If you give an honest accounting of the important people and events in your life, as you best remember them, you will also tell the story of everybody who needs to be along on the ride. Throw everything else away.
Shared our lives online
At the end of 2006 I met my best friend. We met online. I didn’t know she was my best friend then. I just knew she was cool and had great taste in room porn. It didn’t take me long to find out that she was warm and kind and funny and fierce and loyal and smart and feisty and strong and loving … with great taste in room porn. She was always there for me through thick and thin and for both of us there were thick and thin times. Before too long she was a part of my life, a very special part. Kim and I have never met. We haven’t even spoken on the phone. We have shared our lives online and today I wish I could actually run up to her, throw my arms around her and wish her all the happiness in the world.
Not Writing
Writing is hard—writers say this all the time, and I think probably only other writers believe it. But it’s not nearly as hard, in my experience, as not writing.
During my should-be-writing years, I thought about my novel all the time. Increasingly, these were not happy or satisfying thoughts.
…
I woke one night in the midst of a minor panic attack. It wasn’t unusual for me wake in the night, anxious and scared—and I always knew the source of the panic right away. But it was rare for my heavy-sleeping husband to wake at the same time. And instead of reassuring him and letting him get back to sleep, I told him the naked, humbling truth. I told him that if I didn’t finish my novel, I thought my future happiness might be at risk. He wiped his eyes and yawned and said, “OK. Let’s figure out how to make this happen.”
It didn’t happen overnight, but the tide of my life shifted.
Changing Forever
When I was about ten a pen pal came to visit from all the way across the country and I didn’t notice her for a few days after discovering a copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s Meet the Austins in her suitcase.
“Want to go swimming?” she would ask. “Want to ride bikes? Want to watch TV?”
No. I was reading. I was busy becoming an Austin. There were four kids in that family and in my family there was only me, but for the duration of the book and all subsequent readings, I owned those brothers and sisters. I had to make sure Vicki recovered from her fall off her bike, that Maggie didn’t get Suzie into too much trouble, that nobody froze during the ice storm. A beloved pen pal paled in comparison.
That’s what reading used to feel like: changing into something better, or at least different, for a short time. Becoming the characters. Changing forever.
You know I had to quote this. I was just so surprised to see someone else mention Meet the Austins this way.
I suppose it’s funny to list Meet the Austins as a Book that Changed My Life, but it was. (Perhaps the first?) I was 12, the book was a gift/prize from the school librarian for some aborted contest I’d entered (random!), and after meeting the Austins I was addicted to MLE to the point where seeking out all her books was a quest for me for a long time. (I even found/read the elusive Ilsa.) And, arguably, MLE was my entry into literary fiction. So, yeah, defining moment.
Life is dangerous
Properly experienced, life is a very risky behavior.
…
Instead of trying to live a risk-free existence, let me tell you a few things that are truly worth worrying about:
The road not taken.
The destination not explored.
The adventure not pursued.
The life unlived.If we’re going to lose sleep over something, it seems to me that those are the things that should keep us awake.
Life is dangerous. It’s risky. It’s worth it.
An object of attachment
My tears [as I started to read Swallows and Amazons] could perhaps have been nostalgia (defined as memories of things that never happened) but I think they were a matter of attachment, as when one is reunited with an attachment person after a period of separation and danger. In the first paragraph of Swallows and Amazons, I was suddenly reunited with an object of attachment. I have read all of Ransome’s children’s books, I think when I was between eight and eleven. I used to own the whole set. I remember them on a bookshelf. They must have been given to me, one by one, by my parents. … My attachment to these books was made at a time when neither my parents nor I knew anything about. sailing. It must have been Ransome’s books that implanted in me the desire to sail.
Trophy
The creative possibilities that physical books offer is invigorating and rewarding. Featuring a book on your bookshelf is akin to displaying a trophy. You’ve accomplished something in reading a book; it feels like a victory. The opportunity to display your literary conquests in unique or unexpected ways is something I will greatly miss with e-readers.
A necessary part of life
[People’s] differences give rise to disagreements, and the combination of these disagreements can give rise to even greater misunderstandings. As a result, sometimes people are unfairly criticized. This goes without saying. It’s not much fun to be misunderstood or criticized, but rather a painful experience that hurts people deeply. As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve gradually come to the realization that this kind of pain and hurt is a necessary part of life. If you think about it, it’s precisely because people are different from others that they’re able to create their own independent selves. … Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.
—Haruki Murakami,
What I Talk About When I Talk About Writing (p. 19)
Where I needed to be
In some sense, what I was doing was perverse, for I was drawn to photograph in places where I didn’t particularly like to be. I would say ‘I love these places,’ and I didn’t really, at least not in the sense my audience probably thought. I was secretly afraid that the discrepancy indicated some irremediable bad faith at the heart of my enterprise, but I didn’t know what I could do about it since I didn’t want to do anything else. It took some time for me to understand that my discomfort was a sign that I was where I needed to be.
The Remainder Table 