Just through the process of trying to make the living and the dead feel real, all these little benefits came out. And these benefits turned out to be much more articulate statements of what I really believe. And somehow they were more convincing because they were arrived at at such length.
I always say that my artist statement is to not be afraid to talk about the messiness - the unpleasant feelings and happenings around my life. I also try to convey what it feels like and sounds like and smells like and looks like inside of my particular skin, to move through the world as a black American woman in her mid-twenties. Language from songs and TV shows feel integral because it helps to create the environment and describe the full picture.
I think it is an accurate statement to say that some people consider feelings of same-gender attraction to be the defining fact of their existence. There are also people who consider the defining fact of their existence that they are from Texas or that they were in the United States Marines. Or they are red-headed, or they are the best basketball player that ever played for such-and-such a high school. People can adopt a characteristic as the defining example of their existence and often those characteristics are physical.
My theory for nonfiction is that nobody can be free of some kind of conceptions about whatever story they're writing. But if you can find a way to build those into the story, then the story becomes a process of deconstructing and heightening and sometimes changing those notions and that makes dramatic tension. The initial statement of your position, and then letting reality act on you to change it, is pretty good storytelling.
Hillary Clinton is a world class liar. Just look at her pathetic email server statements, or her phony landing - or her phony landing in Bosnia, where she said she was under attack, and the attack turned out to be young girls handing her flowers. A total and self-serving lie. Brian Williams' career was destroyed for saying less.
In 2007 and 2008, it was impossible to get American and British policy makers, or Pakistani politicians, to acknowledge that the Taliban leadership was in Pakistan. This is the great virtue of the early statements of the Obama administration, when Obama himself, Richard Holbrooke and others, said that the threat to both countries comes principally from western Pakistan, in Balujistan and Waziristan. So there has been some progress, but probably the hardest part is yet to come.
I don't go looking for phantom statements from people I support. I don't imagine phantom statements because I support them. If they do things that I don't like or don't agree with, my support can go. I mean, my support's not wedded to anybody at all times ever, depending.
With regard to nuclear weapons, it's kind of hard to say. [Donald Trump] is said lots of things. The national security experts are terrified. But they're more terrified by his personality than by his statements.
If you read people like say Bruce Blair one of the leading, most sober, knowledgeable specialists, he says, look, [Donald Trump] statements are all over the map, but his personality is frightening, he's a complete megalomaniac.
Some of [Donald Trump] comments can be interpreted as potentially reducing the threat of nuclear war. The major threat right now is right on the Russian border. Notice, not the Mexican border, the Russian border. And it's serious. He has made various statements moving towards reducing the tensions, accommodating Russian concerns and so on.
It's this kind of wild unpredictability, megalomania, thin-skinned craziness that really has me worried, more than [Donald Trump] statements. Now, on the climate change there's just nothing to say, he's perfectly straightforward.
What's the purpose of NATO? Well actually we have an official answer. It isn't publicized much, but a couple of years ago, the secretary-general of NATO made a formal statement explaining the purpose of NATO in the post-Cold War world is to control global energy systems, pipelines, and sea lanes. That means it's a global system and of course he didn't say it, it's an intervention force under US command, as we've seen in case after case. So that's NATO.
There is the Jewish Agency, which gets a lot of money from the United States, from American Jews, whose sole job it is to create settlements. It enlists people all over the world - especially in Russia, and in the United States, by the way - to come and settle in the Occupied Territories as a kind of religious statement, a kind of nationalist statement: "This is a country given to us by God." A lot of Israelis who do not believe in God believe that God has given us this country.
The governor of Minnesota [Mark Dayton], a couple of months ago he said that the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable. He's a staunch Democrat. Very strong Democrat. He said it's no longer affordable. He made that statement. And Bill Clinton on the campaign trail - and he probably had a bad night that night when he went home - but he said, "Obamacare is crazy. It's crazy." And you know what, they were both right.
[Betsy] DeVos's statement turned a well-known Trump slogan, and proclaimed, we will make American education great again. Proponents of school choice were ecstatic, including Sandy Kress, a top education adviser in George W. Bush's administration.
I think this [ statement that Donald Trump would fight for LGBTQ people] is not just a story of the media spinning people up, but it's a story of special interests on the left, who also feel like their candidate lost, and stoking the flames on the fire because it helps spin up their supporters and help their donations and help their organizations. And it helps, frankly, polarize the country to their short-term benefit and at the expense, frankly, of progress for LGBTQ Americans.
One thing that concerns me is that today's young women don't seem to care that we have a fundamental instrument of government that makes no express statement about the equal citizenship stature of men and women. They know there are no closed doors anymore, and they may take for granted the rights that they have.
Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.
I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as much a political statement as a Rolls Royce radiator grille, one enshrining a machine aesthetic driven by a populist optimism, the other enshrining a hierarchical and exclusive social order.
In choosing Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney made a fantastic choice and a bold statement to the American people.
A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
I however don't go to clubs to show off and to be seen, and certainly not to make statements. I just want to be able to quietly watch a band.
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
I am sure that every one of my colleagues "Democrat, Republican, and Independent" agrees with that statement. That in the voting booth, every one is equal.
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