I was bored at school and bored in a lot of the kitchens. It seemed like all I was doing was putting things into saute pans.
When I was in Pulp, I actively did more TV stuff because that was during the Great Britpop Wars, and it seemed important to prove that indie people could speak. That war doesn’t exist anymore.
As I was coming up, it always seemed like I was learning. If it wasn’t from school, it was the ‘hood. The influences of the ‘hood are very powerful.
I went into acting because I’m easily bored. Acting seemed to give vent to a lot of different feelings.
I don’t think anything I’ve written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. ‘World’s Fair’ was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book.
The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings.
Yes, now I understood for the first time that my soul was not so poor and empty as it had seemed to me, and that it had been only the sun that was lacking to open all its germs, and buds to the light.
Peter, of the three of us, was our prince. He seemed so timeless. He had such elan and style.
When I began writing science fiction in the middle ’60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.
I’m frustrated by something, it’s my fault for exposing myself to it in the first place. The rumor mill always seemed like a grass fire to me. Why walk out in the middle of the field, it’s just going to flame out and go away just like everything else does?
I remember three- and four-week-long snow days, and drifts so deep a small child, namely me, could get lost in them. No such winter exists in the record, but that’s how Ohio winters seemed to me when I was little – silent, silver, endless, and dreamy.
I liked 35 and in both my novels that is the age of the lead characters. I tried making them my age but they just seemed to keep moaning about stuff.
A maverick feels like he has no choice however difficult his choice of expression. In my case, it was going backwards into tonality. It seemed so wrong. The idea that progress is going into the past in a new way is very strange, even though there are precedents.
The situation of the Old Left was the theory of Socialist Realism, etc. It seemed pointless to argue. We stayed carefully away from people who wrote for the New Masses.
It seemed uncanny that words, spread across a page just so, had the power to transport me to another time or place. But they could.
It often seemed like we had become a nation where the only heroes were rock singers and ball players and that there were no large men of probity who could be called upon for the task.
