The Office Is A Romantic Enabler Because

We Were Fractious And Overpaid. Our Mornings Lacked Promise. At Least Those Of Us Who Smoked Had Something To Look Forward To At Ten-fifteen.

I Always Knew From The Beginning That This Was The Only Way To Write Then We Came To The End - That It Had To Be In First - Person Plural If It Was Going To Illustrate How The Individual Becomes Part Of The Collective. I Had No Interest In Writing The Book In A More Conventional Voice. It Goes Back To That Fascination I Had With Telling A Story In Multiple Ways. It Was The Only Choice I Gave Myself, Really - I Said "this Is It, Pal. If You Can't Tell A Story This Way, You're Going To Have To Abandon The Book. Write It This Way Or Give Up."

Why Shouldn't It Be That Way For The Rest Of Us? Why Not Just Go With It? Just Walk The Dog And Send The Tweets And Eat The Scones And Play With The Hamsters And Ride The Bicycles And Watch The Sunsets And Stream The Movies And Never Worry About Any Of It? I Didn't Know It Could Be That Easy. I Didn't Know That Until Just Now. That Sounds Good To Me.

We Told Him To Get On With It. We Liked Wasting Time, But Almost Nothing Was More Annoying Than Having Our Wasted Time Wasted On Something Not Worth Wasting It On.

The Thing Is, For Me, As A Fiction Writer, I Don't Think There's A Finer Testament To Our Lives Than This Thing That's Being Spurned - The Emotional Intelligence, The Ethics, The Beauty. It's All There. It's All So Fully Contained In A Novel That Succeeds. But At The Same Time, I Understand The Impulse To Put Away Childish Things.