Words matter. These are the best Stacey D’Erasmo Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.
The deeper changes wrought by the end of a particular outlaw culture: something will come of that … and it won’t be what we expect.
What interests me are the complexities and contradictions and struggles and joys of messy human beings.
The songs in ‘Wonderland’ don’t have a melodic life for me – I’m not a musical person – but they have an emotional life, an emotional echo perhaps.
A lot of first novels are coming-of-age stories. A lot are autobiographical.
Reading ‘The Third Sex’ feels a bit like flying in a veering helicopter over a rain forest that is disappearing before one’s eyes.
There are more clocks than ever – clocks on computers, on cell phones, on televisions, on any screen available, telling time to the digital second – but they all seem to matter less.
I never thought much about God, certainly never wondered whether God was thinking about me, until I fell in love with a Zen Buddhist priest.
The spirits of Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebbing waft through the text to lend ‘The Third Sex’ an air of scientific authority.
One of the first times that I went into a book store and saw a bunch of my books, my impulse was to put them all under my coat and run away so that no one else could see them, even though, of course, I wanted everyone to see them.
In my family, we were on again off again Unitarians, partly because my father, raised Roman Catholic, had had enough of church.
What is the distance between here and there, between now and then, between right and wrong? In Greg Baxter’s pellucid first novel, ‘The Apartment,’ it may be simply the length of a day – but a day in which one travels surprisingly far, literally and figuratively.
There is no such thing as a natural fit between form and content. Seamless elegance would be tantamount to erasure.
I’m embarrassed to reveal that I never went to CBGB’s in the ’80s. I was never cool enough to be a punk, and I wouldn’t have had the stamina, or the discipline, for straight-edge.
That feeling of being part of a group moving together is very powerful. It feels like it opens up a zone of possibility, a place for another self to form, also a place for a new world to form.
As readers, we sense when the game is being played for real and when something else is afoot: pride, showmanship, the pursuit of power, self-aggrandizement, revenge, making money. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that, but I dislike closing a book with the sense that I’ve been had.
‘The Girls,’ by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives in a rural corner of Canada.
Of course, a secret is no good if it doesn’t need to be a secret.
One of the many pleasures of ‘Versailles’ is the way in which it seems to emanate not only from the vexed inner being of Marie Antoinette but from the interstices between what we imagine of her and what she was.
The second time is the one we remember, where memory begins. Putting the moments in order is only half the story. What matters is the weight of the moments as they accumulate.
For the Supreme Court, the right for everyone to say ‘I do’ is where the story ends, but for artists, it’s where the story just starts to get interesting.
‘The Girls’ tells the story of Rose and Ruby Darlen, who are not only literally but spiritually attached for eternity. Born joined at the head in 1974 to a feckless teenage mother who abandons them, and reared by a delightfully open-minded adoptive couple, the Darlen girls are darling girls, indeed.
Royalty mostly seem like members of some anachronistic faith, like the Amish, peculiar in gilded buggies.
In my darker moments, I feel like the Queen of England, bound and gagged by reverence. Tin-crowned and irrelevant.
On a deeper level, there’s a level of privacy that I need in order to work, and if there’s been a time when there’s been a lot of publicness in my life, it can be a little bit difficult to sort of rebuild that private space.
