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There are always surprises. Life may be inveterately grim and the surprises disproportionately unpleasant, but it would be hardly worth living if there were no exceptions, no sunny days, no acts of random kindness.

T.C. Boyle

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T.C. Boyle
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More quotes by T.C. Boyle

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In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of life. (Barnes & Noble Review, email dialogue with Cameron Martin, Feb. 09, 2009
T.C. Boyle
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The hardest thing in a novel is time. You've got [a line like] two weeks later, he woke up with a headache, and you've got to add up that entire two weeks and what the date is and whether it works. That kind of stuff drives me crazy and if I don't have it exactly right, I can't move forward because I don't feel confident.
T.C. Boyle
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I was joking earlier when I said that all writers are manic depressives, but it's a joke with a lot of truth behind it. For fiction writers and poets, too, there's something wrong with you and you do this art as a way of correcting it or addressing it in some way.
T.C. Boyle
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Everything we do is escapism, because we'll all be dead and everything we do is completely meaningless. Why brush your teeth? Why not be in the park with the bums passing a short dog? Why pay taxes, why get educated? Of course literature is an escape. You have to fill the hours.
T.C. Boyle
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At best, I consider flying an unavoidable necessity, a time to resurrect forgotten prayers and contemplate the end of all joy in a twisted howling heap of machinery at worst, I rank it right up there with psychotic episodes and torture at the hands of malevolent strangers.
T.C. Boyle
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From my point of view, why shouldn't I work in every possible mode, to see if it's viable? Los Gigantes would not have worked as a straightforward, naturalistic tale. Part of the fun of it is that it's so preposterous and yet at the same time, it could have happened. Think of eugenics. Hitler certainly would have been doing it if he could have
T.C. Boyle
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When you're in the midst of writing, it's a beautiful thing happening through you. Many people have said that it's not you, it's the soul of humankind and so on, I don't know. But it has the same effect [as music]. It takes you out of your body and out of this planet.
T.C. Boyle
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The hardest part is always the middle of anything because at that point, on some unconscious level, you have to figure out what it's about and why you're doing it and what it means. You don't know that in the beginning.
T.C. Boyle
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I'm pretty hardcore. I stick exactly to what I'm doing. So I write a novel in one period, and then I'll write stories in another period. I only work on one thing at once, because I'm afraid that I wouldn't finish what I'd started.
T.C. Boyle
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I always dread the process of writing because I'm not a writer. I'm an audible guy, I'm a verbal guy. I love to talk. I write a book every couple years, but it just takes everything out of me to get a book out.
T.C. Boyle
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I've always been a huge fan of theatre and performance. The idea of just the human voice and just this night. Live music is the same. They're doing it for you right now. It's an amazing thing. And if you perform a story properly, it can be a transporting, too.
T.C. Boyle
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A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new.
T.C. Boyle
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Basically for me a story can be anything. Anything you tell me, anything I read in the newspaper, in any mode. I don't have any restrictions.
T.C. Boyle
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I've had many students over the years, sometimes even very sophisticated students, who will be writing and will hit a wall. Often I find it's because they're working out of sequence. Maybe some people can do that, but I don't think that's how fiction works. It's a discovery.
T.C. Boyle
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But then, that's the beauty of writing stories-each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there's no feeling like it.
T.C. Boyle
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You're not getting the joy out of literature that it gave you. This is the danger of what we do. Look at Hemingway and so many others. You devote your life to one thing, that is what you are. It's artificial but it's all you have. If you lose it, then you're nothing and there's no point in going on.
T.C. Boyle
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Criticism can be wonderful, especially in making connections in an interpretive way. But by applying theories randomly, it's an interesting exercise, but I don't think it illuminates the literature.
T.C. Boyle
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Music is, by far, the best art. Nothing even comes close. It's so immediate and emotional. In writing, maybe ninety percent of it is the unconscious and ten percent is control. In music, I think it's probably more like ninety-nine percent the unconscious. It's just a beautiful thing happening through you. And so, too, is writing a great story.
T.C. Boyle
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Alcohol had a lot to do with it, too, and mental instability. All writers are narcissistic, manic-depressive drug addicts and alcoholics, and I am no exception.
T.C. Boyle
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To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of man.
T.C. Boyle