Lydia Millet
What makes 'The Lorax' such a powerful fable is partly its shamelessness. It pulls no punches; it wears its teacher heart on its sleeve.Collection: Teacher
The Safari Club International has worked the legal system hard to try to keep polar bears - threatened primarily by climate change, but also by hunting - on the list of creatures people can import as trophies after shooting.Collection: Legal
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.Collection: Sad
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.Collection: Sympathy
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.
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.
I've always been interested in obsessive, insane people.
Indeed, the hype around 'Watchmen' is its curse. If you want to enjoy the comic for what it is, ignore the attributions of literariness and the novelistic pretensions with which some critics have imbued it. This isn't high culture, and it doesn't pretend to be. It's good, juicy pulp fiction with a little nuclear apocalypse thrown in.
Names and other proper nouns shouldn't distract from the language.
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 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.
In the 1970s, Safari Club International asked the federal government to approve its import of 1,125 not-yet-killed trophies of 40 endangered species, including gorillas, orangutans and tigers, according to the Humane Society of the United States.
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.
We were a Seuss family. As a child, I read almost all of his books, but the one I loved best was 'The Lorax.'
Shouldn't the cascades of extinction and rapid planetary warming register in our literature?
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.
Work-wise, I try not to repeat myself too often. And I have to love whatever I'm doing.
My motto is, if you love something, don't set it free. No matter how hard it struggles. That would be stupid.
If I can't find a way to love it, I let it go. Kind of the opposite of the popular homily.
'Dept. of Speculation' contains numerous enviable lines.
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.
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.
You need not fear my extinction. Fear my proliferation! I've already reproduced!
I think that young readers have very strong stomachs.
I'm not calculating enough in the way I approach writing.
I don't like names that are clever or made-up sounding.
I don't tend to picture my characters as actors and actresses.
I'm for any woman who loves sloths.
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.
No one bought my screenplays.
I wanted to go into the tropics and save animals - and write, of course.
You're lucky if people like your book, and the more people that like it, the luckier I feel.
One man's holy is another woman's sublime.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I never seem to leave L.A., though I left L.A.
L.A., for me, is a perfect microcosm of America - because it's so profligate, and so glamorous, and so anti-intellectual, finally.
Most of my books have something to do with L.A.
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've always wondered: is there really any access to the White House?
People who are obsessed amuse me.
I don't write the same book twice.
As soon as a regular guy like Bill Clinton becomes the president, he wears a mantle of greatness. He's the president.
I like to amuse myself.
Everyone desires to laugh sometimes, and I want to make that available.
There has to be space for play in literature. We all need some breathing room.
It's a friendly act to write a lighthearted book.