Ruth Ozeki
People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.Collection: Legal
Any independent bookstore that has managed to survive is the best place to do a reading.
I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.
For me, writing is a way of thinking. I write in a journal a lot. I'm a very impatient person, so writing and meditation allow me to slow down and watch my mind; they are containers that keep me in place, hold me still.
The relationship between reader and writer is reciprocal in a way. We co-create each other. We are constantly emerging out of the relationship we have with others.
Inspiration comes from everything from the entire world, and it's hard to pinpoint one thing. I can trace one inspiration to the writing of 13th-century Zen master Dogen Zenji, who writes beautifully about time.
Maybe all teenagers feel like they don't fit in. I never felt like a cool kid. I remember being bullied for being Asian.
The American society around me looked at me and saw Japanese. Then, when I was 19, I went to Japan for the first time. And suddenly - what a shock - I realized I wasn't Japanese; they saw me as American. It was an enormous relief. Now I just appreciate being exactly in the middle.
For a writer, you definitely do not want to be in the mainstream. You want to be on the edge because that's where the vantage point is. That's where you can see.
My mind is like a gyre, and odd juxtapositions happen.
I think that all writing is in search of lost time. I'm starting to realise that very clearly.
Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I should say - because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as an array of possibilities.
There's something about the idea of writing, and thinking about writing as a form of prayer - the way as a writer you call out into the world and throw your words into the world. You're not praying to a god, but you're almost conjuring a reader to arrive. That's what books do: they're an invitation to readers.
Writing is solitary. You spend so much time alone and in your own mind, telling stories.
When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.
I am really interested in the way we relate to time. In particular, the way readers and writers talk to each other. Casting your voice out into the future is very beautiful to me.
When I'm writing a novel, which is what I like to write, I get up early, sit zazen, make a pot of green tea. I wear wrist cuffs to keep my wrists warm and minimize irritation from extended contact with the surface of my desk. I sit down and write.
There's something about Vonnegut's deadpan irony that I really like. And I like Borges' puzzle structure.
I live in a beautiful part of British Columbia, and I run through the rainforest. I do have to look over my shoulder to check for a cougar or a wolf though, so sometimes it's not the most relaxing.
Canada has always been a great place for literature. It's strong and growing stronger, and there will always be reading, and there will always be great writers.
I've always played that edge of fact and fiction. I used to be a filmmaker, and certainly in film that's a line that filmmakers cross more readily and more easily than novelists.
When I write fiction, I have the illusion of being able to control these fictional worlds and these characters, and to make them say what I want them to say. Of course, the problem is that it is an illusion, and by the end of it you realize that you're not in control of it at all; the characters have taken over, and they're driving the vehicle.
It makes me nuts, the idea that if you put a political struggle at the heart of your book, then it has to be that the author - me - is trying in some way to push my views onto my readers.
I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.
It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4.
Even though I was making documentaries, my films had fictional elements to them. I think I like blurring those distinctions because so much of what we see on television purports to be the truth, but it's often largely imaginary - or wishful thinking, or any number of less honorable things.
What's fascinating to me is the way that multiple stories go into creating any world - a fictional world, but certainly the world that we live in as well. Of course, I cannot control that world. I can just control the fictional world.
When I start writing these novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.
Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.Collection: Memories
The wondrous thing about nature, her gift to us, is her wanton promiscuity. She reproduces herself with abandon, with teeming infinite generosity.Collection: Generosity
Life is fleeting. Don't waste a single moment of your precious life. Wake up now! And now! And now!Collection: Life
I think that if we don't learn to inhabit other people's perspectives, then we're never going to understand why people do what they do.Collection: Thinking
Do all kids have to worry about their parents’ mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it’s the other way around.Collection: Kids
Am I crazy?" she asked. "I feel like I am sometimes." "Maybe," he said, rubbing her forehead. "But don't worry about it. You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination. It's your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It's a good thing not a bad thing.Collection: Dream
I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.Collection: Beautiful
Life is evanescent, but left to itself it rarely fails to offer some consolation.Collection: Life Is
Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.Collection: Wake Up
But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then.Collection: Over It
Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, and in even a fraction of a second, we have the opportunity to choose, and to turn the course of our action either toward the attainment of truth or away from it. Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world.Collection: Opportunity
There are many answers, none of them right, but some of them most definitely wrong.Collection: Life
The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if it did exists, but doesn’t now, then where did it go ?Collection: Mean
She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.Collection: New York
The important thing was that we were being polite and not saying all the things that were making us unhappy, which was the only way we knew how to love each other.Collection: Important
language is magical - it's a form of conjuring. If you do it convincingly, readers will follow you.Collection: Language
Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.Collection: Eye
You never know who it's going to be, or what they'll bring, but whatever it is, it's always exactly what is needed.Collection: Needed
...I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you. A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.Collection: Life
By the time we, consumers, are aware of processes like genetic engineering, they're already being done. It's sort of like the war in Iraq: By the time we know about it, it's almost a fait accompli. And that's certainly true with science.Collection: War
Writing a book is a way of thinking to me, the only way of thinking that I have found successful.Collection: Book
What if I travel so far away in my dreams that I can't get back in time to wake up?Collection: Dream