I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.
There's something really fun and spooky about that teenage feeling of narcissism or indestructibility, like the idea that every night might be the night before the world ends.
You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it.
I've always thought darker characters were more fun to play. They're probably not any more complex or interesting than their good, law-abiding cousins, and I'd always tend to see things from their point of view.
And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.
One of the hardest things for me to do is be fully open in a poem. By that I mean, honest and not trying to amplify some mythological version of myself. I was a poor, geeky black kid in Indianapolis. There is nothing mythological about that. So to try to truly render the kind of economic and racial inequity I grew up in, I had to find a way to be more honest about what happened. And it wasn't fun to write, even though the poems aren't 100% autobiographical.
A man imagines a happy marriage as a marriage of love; even if he makes fun of marriages that are without love, or feels sorry for lovers who are without marriage.
Airports - they're not my idea of fun at all. Some of the staff are lovely, but you do always get one or two that seem to forget that it's actually costing you a lot of money to be there and be insulted by their surliness. Times have obviously changed and we need to get used to being more strictly vetted, but they could be more pleasant about it. A smile wouldn't go amiss.