Readers And Writers Are United In Their

The Place Of Stillness That You Have To Go To To Write, But Also To Read Seriously, Is The Point Where You Can Actually Make Responsible Decisions, Where You Can Actually Engage Productively With An Otherwise Scary And Unmanageable World.

Fiction, I Believed, Was The Transmutation Of Experiential Dross Into Linguistic Gold. Fiction Meant Taking Up Whatever The World Had Abandoned By The Road And Making Something Beautiful Out Of It.

Deploring Other People--their Lack Of Perfection--had Always Been Our Sport.

I Think We Live In An Era Of Problems That, If You Step Back And Look At Them Globally, Can't Be Solved. One Response To That Is, "oh Well, It's All Hopeless. The Natural World Is Getting Wrecked, Birds Are Disappearing, The Planet Is Warming And So Anything We Might Do On A Smaller Scale Is Meaningless."

What You Discovered About Yourself In Raising Children Wasn't Always Agreeable Or Attractive.