Everyone desires to laugh sometimes, and I want to make that available.
— Lydia Millet
I don't write the same book twice.
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.
I never seem to leave L.A., though I left L.A.
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.
I advise, if you're stymied by a passage or paragraph or plot point - whether it's for an assignment from the outside world or one that comes only from within - get up from wherever you're sitting, walk outdoors, and do nothing but look at the sky for five minutes. Just stare at that thing. Then execute a small bow and go back in.
One man's holy is another woman's sublime.
No one bought my screenplays.
I'm for any woman who loves sloths.
I don't like names that are clever or made-up sounding.
You need not fear my extinction. Fear my proliferation! I've already reproduced!
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.
My motto is, if you love something, don't set it free. No matter how hard it struggles. That would be stupid.
What makes 'The Lorax' such a powerful fable is partly its shamelessness. It pulls no punches; it wears its teacher heart on its sleeve.
I like to amuse myself.
People who are obsessed amuse me.
Most of my books have something to do with L.A.
I've always been interested in obsessive, insane people.
I've seen a few wild grizzly bears, mostly in Alaska and British Columbia, and always from a distance. But each grizzly I've caught sight of was as fearsome and sublime as the last. You never get used to their raw power and massive bodies, or the mysterious intelligence in their dark, close-set eyes.
If you're going to do a thing, do it fully so that no writing you give the world misrepresents you - so that nothing you put out there is like a sad regift you couldn't throw away and had to find a place for.
You're lucky if people like your book, and the more people that like it, the luckier I feel.
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.
I don't tend to picture my characters as actors and actresses.
I'm not calculating enough in the way I approach writing.
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.
'Dept. of Speculation' contains numerous enviable lines.
Work-wise, I try not to repeat myself too often. And I have to love whatever I'm doing.
Shouldn't the cascades of extinction and rapid planetary warming register in our literature?
As soon as a regular guy like Bill Clinton becomes the president, he wears a mantle of greatness. He's the president.
I've always wondered: is there really any access to the White House?
L.A., for me, is a perfect microcosm of America - because it's so profligate, and so glamorous, and so anti-intellectual, finally.
Historically, grizzlies ranged from Alaska to Mexico, with at least 50,000 bears living in the western half of the contiguous United States. With European colonization, the bears were shot, poisoned, and trapped to the brink of extinction.
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.
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.
I wanted to go into the tropics and save animals - and write, of course.
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.
Names and other proper nouns shouldn't distract from the language.
I think that young readers have very strong stomachs.
On climate change, we have only a handful of years to make massive changes, according to the scientists. The politicians have to act, and only the people can make them, because Royal Dutch Shell's not going to do it.
If I can't find a way to love it, I let it go. Kind of the opposite of the popular homily.
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.
We were a Seuss family. As a child, I read almost all of his books, but the one I loved best was 'The Lorax.'
