Quotes from Dean Bakopoulos

What a thrill it is to have my writing recognized by an institution as admirable and vital as the National Endowment for the Arts.

I write in an old-school paneled study in the middle of a large farmhouse in rural Iowa. I have pine floors, a big cherry desk, and a small window. The room is cluttered with papers and books and gifts from friends.

People are used to juggling multiple jobs and multiple responsibilities and multiple things on the home front, and sometimes you get a day off to read, and you just want a book that feels complete and that you can get through it on a rainy day on the couch.

In all honesty, my favorite place to write is an anonymous, cheap hotel in a city or town where nobody knows me, the wireless service is spotty, and the adjoining gas station has coffee, beer and junk food.

I write while listening to music, mostly because the world beyond my headphones is too chaotic.

Once I have a book in my head, I write progressive drafts fast and obsessively and have trouble sleeping.

A good TV writer needs all the same tricks a good novelist has.

In real life, I go to the North Shore with my kids for two weeks each summer, and it's a magical place for us. I feel restored there and connected to the ancient, pre-human world in a way that no place else on Earth does for me.

Midlife is when you have to accept what you've created, knowing that the life you have is is the only one you'll live. And that can be terrifying, until you accept it, and then you are free of terror.

Then it's just day by day. And most days are beautiful, Don. It's regretting yesterday or overthinking tomorrow, that's when ugliness comes in, right?

We're all terrible people. Eventually, we all become terrible, maybe around the middle of our lives, and then, if we're lucky, we have time to find a way to be good again.

Like an eye, the moon follows us wherever we go.

There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one. —Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

This is what e-mail is: either a cowardly way for people to ask favors of you that they would never ask in person, or a way for people to pretend they are having a friendship with you when they really are not.

I still have a tendency to sit back and wait out the bad things that try and take over my life.

They could stay in Iowa. Lots of people do that. Millions of them, like four million of them, stay in Iowa, year after year.

Inexplicably, I felt a war was coming on, and for many nights I had dreams that I died in battle. I dreamed of mountains that crumbled and rivers that flooded. My dreams were apocalyptic and savage. I began to fear that I was a prophet and that I would soon be called upon to speak. I waited for God's voice.

Bon Iver, "Holocene

hay gold dusk of late spring

Loneliness is a kind of suffering you can alleviate. It's not something you have to endure, like grief.

He is on the precipice of cheating, maybe, which in itself is a kind of thrill for him, and yet, if he thinks about it too much he knows it is the same thing. On the precipice or over the precipice, once you're there, you're there.

We almost killed ourselves with rage. We would grow up trampling over things, tearing things down, and people would look at us and wonder why we had such violence in our hearts.

Music - which I could never listen to while writing before I had children - became essential to my process.