Lydia Millet Quotes
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I worry about the very pernicious way we elevate and separate ourselves from other beasts, the way we rationalize our comfort and ease, our worship of the self, as healthy. It's enticing, but with a terrible taint of evil.
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I don't tend to picture my characters as actors and actresses.
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For almost two centuries, American gray wolves, vilified in fact as well as fiction, were the victims of vicious government extermination programs. By the time the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, only a few hundred of these once-great predators were left in the lower 48 states.
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People who are obsessed amuse me.
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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.
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I love irony.
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About half of all potential future global warming emissions from United States fossil fuels lie in oil, gas and coal buried beneath our public lands, controlled by the federal government and owned by the American people - and not yet leased to private industry for fuel extraction.
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Shouldn't the cascades of extinction and rapid planetary warming register in our literature?
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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.
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At writing workshops, they taught us to show, not tell - well, showing takes time.
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Do we seek delicate phraseology in politics or other forms of public life? We do not.
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I had hoped that going to Hiroshima would reveal something small, gritty, and precise to countervail the epic quality of historical accounts.
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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.
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Work-wise, I try not to repeat myself too often. And I have to love whatever I'm doing.
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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.
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L.A., for me, is a perfect microcosm of America - because it's so profligate, and so glamorous, and so anti-intellectual, finally.
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I've always wondered: is there really any access to the White House?
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I never seem to leave L.A., though I left L.A.
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At 16, I was more resilient and easygoing than I am now.
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I've always been interested in obsessive, insane people.
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'Dept. of Speculation' contains numerous enviable lines.
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You're lucky if people like your book, and the more people that like it, the luckier I feel.
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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.
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It seems to me that the time for subtlety in our American life has passed.