There Are Few Things, Apparently, More Helpful

...i Just Gave Up Trying To Be A Christian... Let's Face It, I Ain't Got The Knack For Holiness. Besides, I Didn't Have The Slightest Little Desire To Join The Likes Of Reverend Pelham At The Dinner Table For Fourteen Minutes, Much Less At The Banquet Table Of Heaven Eternally. Eternity Is A Mighty Long Time To Be Stuck With People Who Judge Every Word You Say And Think And Condemn Most Of What You Do. It Struck Me As Pretty Miserable Company. And If Reverend Pelham Was The Kind Of Company God Preferred To Keep, Well, I Just Hoped They'd Be Happy Together.

We Humans Have Had From Time Unknown The Compulsion To Name Things And Thus To Be Able To Deal With Them. The Name We Give To Something Shapes Our Attitude Toward It. And In Ancient Thought The Name Itself Has Power, So That To Know Someone's Name Is To Have A Certain Power Over Him. And In Some Societies, As You Know, There Was A Public Name And A Real Or Secret Name, Which Would Not Be Revealed To Others.

I Was Behaving, Just Like I Promised, But Fate Intervened.

A Novel Is Not Born Of A Single Idea. The Stories I've Tried To Write From One Idea, No Matter How Terrific An Idea, Have Sputtered Out And Died By Chapter Three. For Me, Novels Have Invariably Come From A Complex Of Ideas That In The Beginning Seemed To Bear No Relation To Each Other, But In The Unconscious Began Mysteriously To Merge And Grow. Ideas For A Novel Are Like The Strong Guy Lines Of A Spider Web. Without Them The Silken Web Cannot Be Spun.

What A Gift Of Grace To Be Able To Take The Chaos From Within And From It Create Some Semblance Of Order.