A Writer Should Always Feel Like He's

..this Indiscriminate Love Feels Entirely Serious To Her, As If Everything In The World Is Part Of A Vast, Inscrutable Intention And Everything In The World Has Its Own Secret Name, A Name That Cannot Be Conveyed In Language But Is Simply The Sight And Feel Of The Thing Itself.

Philip Glass, Like [virginia] Woolf, Is More Interested In That Which Continues Than He Is In That Which Begins, Climaxes, And Ends... Glass And Woolf Have Both Broken Out Of The Traditional Realm Of The Story, Whether Literary Or Musical, In Favor Of Something More Meditative, Less Neatly Delineated, And More True To Life. For Me, Glass [finds] In Three Repeated Notes Something Of [a] Rapture Of Sameness.

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 Vestibule Door Opens Onto A June Morning So Fine And Scrubbed Classira Pauses At The Threshold As She Would At The Edge Of A Pool, Watching The Turquoise Water Lapping At The Tiles, The Liquid Nets Of Sun Wavering In The Blue Depths. As If Standing At The Edge Of A Pool She Delays For A Moment The Plunge, The Quick Membrane Of Chill, The Plain Shock Of Immersion.

I Encourage The Translators Of My Books To Take As Much License As They Feel That They Need. This Is Not Quite The Heroic Gesture It Might Seem, Because I've Learned, From Working With Translators Over The Years, That The Original Novel Is, In A Way, A Translation Itself.