My Job Is To Have Empathy And

A Reader Is Entitled To Believe What He Or She Believes Is Consonant With The Facts Of The Book. It Is Not Unusual That Readers Take Away Something That Is Spiritually At Variance From What I Myself Experienced. That's Not To Say Readers Make Up The Book They Want. We All Have To Agree On The Facts. But Readers Bring Their Histories And All Sets Of Longings. A Book Will Pluck The Strings Of Those Longings Differently Among Different Readers.

For A Time After My Divorce Everything Began To Seem Profoundly Ironic To Me. I Found Myself Thinking Of Other Peoples' Worries As Sources Of Amusement And Private Derision Which I Thought About At Night To Make Myself Feel Better.

The Ways In Which Things Are Superficially Similar But Also Distinct Is Interesting To Me.

Fear And Hope Are Alike Underneath.

Marrying The Right Girl Is Even More Imperative Today Than It Was When I Was 23 Years Old Because It's So Much Harder To Get On As An Imaginative Writer Like Me Now. You Need To Have Somebody Who Believes In What You're Doing And Who Never Is Skeptical About What You're Doing. My Wife Thought It Was A Great Thing For Me To Be A Writer Because In Practical Terms It Freed Her To Do What She Wanted To Do, Which Was Work.