I think all my characters haunt me. Especially the real-life ones, like Master Chief Carl Brashear, the Tuskagee Airmen. Every time I see a military person, it gives me such a sense of pride but also a sense of responsibility to project excellence when representing them.
Russia itself is an extremely complex country, and sometimes I feel like all of that comes back to haunt me. I can see why so many Russian writers were so tortured.
I’ve never had an actual haunting experience, in the way you might anticipate a ghost in a movie haunting someone, but I do feel presences around me all the time, and I do feel that memories haunt us the way ghosts haunt us or might haunt characters in a film.
Churches that should be talking about the work of Christ on the cross and the grace of God for sinners are stuck on recycled pop psychology, moral exhortation, or entertainment. But these fail to speak to the eternal question that haunts all of us: ‘How do I know that I’m OK?’ We all want to know we are justified.
I do feel guilty. I do. Especially about my family, my children. I write about them, and I know that this will haunt them as well through their lives. Why did I do that to them?
Actually, most things I say in public lead more or less directly to my own compositional practice, so I should be careful about generalizing lest they come back to haunt me.
Life is about choices. Some we regret, some were proud of. Some will haunt us forever. ‘Black Rain’ was very much about choices. The message – we are what we chose to be.
In the 1970s and early ’80s, Shanghai was quiet, cautious, a ghost of a once-great city – and yet physically, little was changed from its glittering heyday. When visiting, I enjoyed reading books on local history and used my time off to scope out the former haunts of gangsters and jazzmen.
I always write about the things that haunt me, the questions I have.
You exorcise the things that haunt you. That’s one good thing about any artistic discipline.
We must ensure that decisions we make today do not come back to haunt us tomorrow.
All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom.
I can think of no other experience quite like that of being 20 or so pages into a book and realizing that this is the real thing: a book that is going to offer the delicious promise of a riveting story, arresting language and characters that will haunt me for days.
Ghosts of Marriages Past can haunt many aspects of a new relationship – your expectations of what a man should do, how you behave in conflict, your ideas of how commitment should look – they can even make your new man look untrustworthy when he’s really behaving normally.
The Miguel Syjuco character is not me. I wanted him to represent my own fears and frustrations and guilt, my own worst tendencies and my optimistic expectations. He’s a cautionary tale for me. But he’s also an examination of the darkest things that haunt me as a person.
If you don’t work through the things that haunt you early, they’ll stay with you for the rest of your life.
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