Words matter. These are the best Lydia Millet Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Shouldn’t the cascades of extinction and rapid planetary warming register in our literature?
It’s a friendly act to write a lighthearted book.
People from the rest of the state tend to hate Phoenix, with that typical resentment of the boroughs and the towns for the big city.
In December 2011, a wild gray wolf set foot in California, the first sighting in almost a century. He’d wandered in from Oregon, looking for a mate.
‘Dept. of Speculation’ contains numerous enviable lines.
The grizzly bears that live in and around Yellowstone make up almost half the population in the lower 48 states, and now those bears are at risk.
There has to be space for play in literature. We all need some breathing room.
At writing workshops, they taught us to show, not tell – well, showing takes time.
Oil drilling and coal mining are killing endangered wildlife, polluting rivers, creating smog over wilderness areas and blocking wildlife corridors in America’s most treasured landscapes.
Marriage is like the romantic ideal, and yet the trappings around it and the culture about it are really the opposite of that.
Within the macho-melodrama tropes of the superhero genre, it’s fair to say ‘Watchmen’ stands out for its rich entertainment, its darkness, and its lurid pleasures. Its vividly drawn panels, moody colors and lush imagery make its popularity well-deserved, if disproportionate.
We paint a slow picture. You can see the brushstrokes. We don’t get to the point, and sometimes when we do, our readers don’t notice, in fact. It’s so couched in nuance, it can fly right over a person’s head. ‘What was that you said? I couldn’t quite make it out.’
The summer after I got divorced, my children asked to sleep in my bed again. It would be the first time we’d shared a bed since they were infants.
If you’re doing creative work, that work should never feel trivial – even if what you’re doing is for hire or lightly intended. Even the mundane doesn’t have to be trivial.
Everyone desires to laugh sometimes, and I want to make that available.
I don’t tend to picture my characters as actors and actresses.
No one bought my screenplays.
Snark describes a cynical position, and I’m not interested in that.
Fiction should be an ethically safe space, free of fancy ideas. It should be dedicated modestly to relationships or escapism or the needs of luscious voyeurs.
Children depend mightily on animals for comfort, inspiration, imagination, and art. And parents have long recognized this.
It seems to me that the time for subtlety in our American life has passed.
My motto is, if you love something, don’t set it free. No matter how hard it struggles. That would be stupid.
The question of one versus two species of African elephants isn’t about settling an arcane DNA argument; it’s about life or death for these majestic, extraordinary creatures.
More than two million years ago, mammoths and Asian elephants took different evolutionary paths – and around the same time, according to DNA research, so did their lumbering relatives in Africa.
Both climate change and extinction are results of our tyranny over the nonhuman world and our domination of, and exploitation of, whole categories of each other – and those, in turn, are clearly linked to agriculture, the cattle-industrial complex, capitalism.
Most climate debates have focused on cutting the use of fossil fuels. But besides a few high-profile scuffles over fuel extraction in vulnerable wild places like the offshore Arctic, political leaders have ignored fossil fuel production as a necessary piece of climate strategy.
In Nagasaki, American planes did drop warning leaflets – but not till Aug. 10, a day after the city was bombed.
What makes ‘The Lorax’ such a powerful fable is partly its shamelessness. It pulls no punches; it wears its teacher heart on its sleeve.
Domestic realism has dominated the American marketplace for decades now. It leeches into literary fiction, and I don’t think it’s that rich a vein.
As soon as a regular guy like Bill Clinton becomes the president, he wears a mantle of greatness. He’s the president.
In 1805, the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, making their way across the West, were warned by American Indian tribes of grizzly bears’ awesome strength.
People who are obsessed amuse me.
I can be pretty dense about my own basic needs, when my focus is getting through the many small tasks of a day’s work and a day’s caretaking.
You need not fear my extinction. Fear my proliferation! I’ve already reproduced!
Work-wise, I try not to repeat myself too often. And I have to love whatever I’m doing.
We read our children stories starring elephants and monkeys and bears to teach them about nobility, curiosity and courage, to warn them against selfishness and stubbornness.
Without elephants, Africa’s landscape would be unrecognizable, yet these animals have fallen by the hundreds of thousands as a result of two enormous waves of poaching in this century – one in the 1970s and 1980s, the other, beginning around 2009, now underway.
If Oak Flat were a Christian holy site or, for that matter, Jewish or Muslim, no senator who wished to remain in office would dare to sneak a backdoor deal for its destruction into a spending bill – no matter what mining-company profits or jobs might result. But this is Indian religion.
If I can’t find a way to love it, I let it go. Kind of the opposite of the popular homily.
I’m for any woman who loves sloths.
When I was 16, I went to Berlin – West Berlin, since at that time a wall still divided the city – to live for three months with a family on an exchange program.
I don’t like names that are clever or made-up sounding.
I don’t write the same book twice.
I had hoped that going to Hiroshima would reveal something small, gritty, and precise to countervail the epic quality of historical accounts.
I think the best fiction is a form of psychological suspense, even though I don’t really write in that idiom.
In Hiroshima, bombed Aug. 6, 1945, no warning was given of the air attack, and thus no escape was possible for the mostly women, children and old people who fell victim.
The Free Body Culture gave me a gift I might never have received had I refused to play along. It left me with an acute sense of the absurd – one I still cherish – to be there among my fellow apes, awkward and less than half-willing, aiming and missing, leaping, landing and wincing.
If the dinosaurs are any indication, there’s a place in our pantheon for the extinct. My son has a blue plushy allosaurus he calls Spot-Spot, with whom he often sleeps.
Wyoming, home to Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons, is also the country’s largest coal producer and one of its largest gas drillers. Two-thirds of the state’s gas-drilling rigs are on public lands in the increasingly industrialized Greater Green River Basin.
The comic novels I did when I was in my 20s had a harder edge – less sympathy for people. Or a sympathy that was harder to detect: Characters’ foibles and obsessive bents were unrelenting, like caricatures.
