alive, and drunk on sunlight

“I think all literature has ideas. […] Ideas about the human condition, and love, and God, and sex, and all of these things are ideas, but the truth is fiction is not a good vehicle for presenting abstract ideas. I mean, non-fiction, journalism, my profession, in which I had my professional degrees, is actually a better way to explicate if you have an idea about some political or scientific method. That’s why scientific journals are full of research reports, they're not full of science fiction stories. What fiction is good about is presenting emotion. Fiction is good about replicating the human experience, and the human heart in conflict is central to all of that. If the story you're telling me doesn't have characters in it that I care about in a situation that's going to engage my emotions, I'm not gonna find it very interesting.”

Literature is one of the few spheres that try to keep us close to the hard facts of the world, because by its very nature it is always psychological, because it focuses on the internal reasoning and motives of the characters, reveals their otherwise inaccessible experience to another person, or simply provokes the reader into a psychological interpretation of their conduct. Only literature is capable of letting us go deep into the life of another being, understand their reasons, share their emotions and experience their fate.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like-what's going on-what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies. "The truth against the world!"-Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

when the characters never really make peace with it

I love asking people how their parents met. You always get an interesting reply. My best friend’s parents met on the relatively new internet in 1999. My other friend’s parents met at Burger King when one was the manager and the other was a regular customer. My parents met at the beach because they were neighbors in their rental houses, mom was on a church trip and dad was getting blackout drunk every night with his friends next door.

i brought katharine of aquitaine to pride with me