You Grow Weary Of Being Treated As

There Is Just This For Consolation: An Hour Here Or There, When Our Lives Seem, Against All Odds And Expectations, To Burst Open And Give Us Everything We've Ever Imagined , Though Everyone But Children (and Perhaps Even They) Knows These Hours Will Inevitably Be Followed By Others, Far Darker And More Difficult. Still, We Cherish The City, The Morning, We Hope, More Than Anything, For More. Heaven Only Knows Why We Love It So.

We Throw Our Parties; We Abandon Our Families To Live Alone In Canada; We Struggle To Write Books That Do Not Change The World, Despite Our Gifts And Our Unstinting Efforts, Our Most Extravagant Hopes. We Live Our Lives, Do Whatever We Do, And Then We Sleep--it's As Simple And Ordinary As That. A Few Jump Out Of Windows Or Drown Themselves Or Take Pills; More Die By Accident; And Most Of Us, The Vast Majority, Are Slowly Devoured By Some Disease Or, If We're Very Fortunate, By Time Itself.

I Just Don't Feel Much Interested In The Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous.

It's The City's Crush And Heave That Move You; Its Intricacy; Its Endless Life. You Know The Story About Manhattan As A Wilderness Purchased For Strings Of Beads, But You Find It Impossible Not To Believe That It Has Always Been A City; That If You Dug Beneath It You Would Find The Ruins Of Another, Older City, And Then Another And Another.

The Lives Great Artists Live And The Books They Write Are Two Very Different Things.