Man, that's the only kind of book I like one that's so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about.
I've been living in Portland for five months and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I probably won't really know for years because that's how it works right? You don't really develop feelings about a place till you've left it. It's like a girl or a dog.
Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature. It becomes a kind of personal weather system. Snow settles in the liver. The bowels grow thick with humidity. Ice congeals in the stomach. Frost spiderwebs in the lungs. The heart fills with warm rain that turns to mist and evaporates through a colder artery.
One of the tricks to writing great plays is to get people in a room together and not let them leave. You want the tension to escalate. Keeping them there is the hardest part, so you have to take away any excuse for them to leave.
I had a sort of bad experiences as a playwright early on, when directors were putting in huge concepts that I didn't intend, or they were stylizing something that was compromising the play, so I started to think like, "well if I'm going to fight against this, I should learn how to direct".
When I got inside, I just sort of stood there. There's nothing stranger than the smell of someone else's house. The scent goes right to your stomach. Mary's house smelled like lemon furniture polish and oatmeal cookies and logs in a fireplace. For some reason it made me want to curl up in the fetal position. I could have slept right there on their kitchen table.
When I kicked in the first TV a nineteen-inch Magnavox with wicker speaker panels it felt like the most perfect thing I had done in a long time. And there's nothing like the feeling of perfection that will inspire repeated behavior.
I feel that I'd rather know an actors' work, or have an instinct about them and sit down and have coffee with them, or I'll see them in something and I'll see if I can get along with them in some way, shape, or form.
I imagine a soul is a little perfect crystal egg floating in your chest. Somewhere deeper than where they put your heart. Somewhere so deep inside that the doctors can't find it with all their machines and microcameras.
In Chekhov, when people leave, a carriage is taking them away forever. The stakes are so high just for someone to make a simple exit. And now we have all this access to public transportation, automobiles and jets and the Internet; we're so easily distracted, but the world is still designed to destroy you. It just happens quicker and faster now.
It was like losing an important weight-bearing bone, and I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to walk the streets without it.