The Lone Sleeper

[William] James said that every vision that ever came to anyone is prefaced by a sense of dissolution of the self. It’s the fragmentation of ego that allowed what he called the oceanic sense to flow in. I find that when I’m merely thinking about a scene I’m in an egoist state, which is the opposite of the state of being where you suppress the ego and go out in spirit to the characters. What writing should be is a going out in spirit. And my idea of storytelling is—I wouldn’t say it’s religious but I would say it’s spiritual. You know, the chemist Friedrich August Kekule worked for twenty years trying to figure out the structure of the benzene ring, and he couldn’t do it. And then one night he was sleeping and he had a vision of a snake swallowing its tail. So he told his students about it and they said, ‘Not bad, you go to sleep and you wake up with that.’ And he said, ‘Visions come to prepared spirits.’ The way Billy Wilder put it was ‘The muse has to know where to find you.’

Great Movies 2016

Indeed, the creation of fiction awes [Stanley Kubrick]. 'It is one of the most phenomenal human achievements,' he says. 'And I have never done it.'

Prince Jones was the superlative of all my fears. And if he, good Christian, scion of a striving class, patron saint of the twice as good, could be forever bound, who then could not? And the plunder was not just of Prince alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of "World Book" and "Childcraft." Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth.