The Vulnerables

by Sigrid Nunez

Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described.

Something is missing. Something has been lost. I believe this is at the heart of why I write.

But the feeling has survived and will not go away: I want to know why I feel as though I have been mourning all my life.

But that happens: writers who once meant everything don’t always thrill in the same way anymore.

“One of the subjects to muse on as old age begins is how unfair life is.”

What comes in late life to many writers, according to J. M. Coetzee: “an ideal of a simple, subdued, unornamented language and a concentration on questions of real import, even questions of life and death.”

I count not having had more animals in my life among my biggest regrets.

“Encountering an animal is a rejuvenation. It opens a door on the other side. The incommunicable.”

Anthropomorphism: we should have made it our religion, I once heard an environmental activist say. Irrational, but then what religion is not. And consider how many more irrational beliefs people have always embraced.

Still, witnessing innocent animal happiness is, as everyone knows, one of our species’ great joys.

(Was there ever anything more predictable than human unkindness? Or more chilling than seeing how early it starts?)

You have to learn from experience what a character in a story by Edna O’Brien states: that the reason love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.

Some writers use pen names so that they can be more truthful; others, so that they can tell more lies.

I like the sliver of ice in the heart that Graham Greene thought every writer must have. I have it.

I can tell the story of my life in just four words. Good times, bad times.

If you’re having trouble concentrating, goes the advice, try writing very short things.

Some argued that if people had the right to choose their gender, why not also the right to choose their race, or their ethnicity?

We did not know the man’s true life—and if we didn’t know his life, how could we know his death? Whom, exactly, were we mourning?

how much of life is shaped by sadness for what’s left behind.

every novelist was a writer who began by wanting to write poetry but failed, then tried to write short stories and failed, and so finally turned to writing novels.

When you tell someone you’re having trouble writing, why does no one ever say, So stop writing? Imagine Editor saying: It doesn’t have to be perfect. “It is bound to be very imperfect,” Virginia Woolf told her diary as she began work on a new novel. Enthusiastic, nevertheless.

The traditional novel has lost its place as the major genre of our time. It may not be dead yet, but it will not long abide. No matter how well done, it seems to lack urgency. No matter how imaginative, it seems to lack originality. While still a powerful means of portraying human character and human experience, somehow, more and more, fictional storytelling is coming across as beside the point.

“Write, live what happens,” advised Christopher Isherwood. “Life is too sacred for invention—though we may lie about it at times, to heighten it.”

“We were told it could take decades for us to achieve the life we dreamed of. What we weren’t told was that by the time we did, that life would soon disappear.”