An Active And Creative Reader Is A

I Think Like A Genius, I Write Like A Distinguished Author, And I Speak Like A Child.... My Hemmings And Hawings Over The Telephone Cause Long-distance Callers To Switch From Their Native English To Pathetic French. At Parties, If I Attempt To Entertain People With A Good Story, I Have To Go Back To Every Other Sentence For Oral Erasures And Inserts.... In These Circumstances Nobody Should Ask Me To Submit To An Interview If By "interview" A Chat Between Two Normal Human Beings Is Implied.

It Was An Interesting Thing To Do. Why Did I Write Any Of My Books, After All? For The Sake Of The Pleasure, For The Sake Of The Difficulty. I Have No Social Purpose, No Moral Message; I've No General Ideas To Exploit, I Just Like Composing Riddles With Elegant Solutions.

And I Want To Rise Up, Throw My Arms Open For A Vast Embrace, Address An Ample, Luminous Discourse To The Invisible Crowds. I Would Start Like This: "o Rainbow-colored Gods. . .

Usually I Read Several Books At A Time - Old Books, New Books, Fiction, Nonfiction, Verse, Anything - And When The Bedside Heap Of A Dozen Volumes Or So Has Dwindled To Two Or Three, Which Generally Happens By The End Of One Week, I Accumulate Another Pile.

I Do Not Begin My Novel At The Beginning, I Do Not Reach Chapter Three Before I Reach Chapter Four, I Do Not Go Dutifully From One Page To The Next, In Consecutive Order; No, I Pick Out A Bit Here And A Bit There, Till I Have Filled All The Gaps On Paper. This Is Why I Like Writing My Stories And Novels On Index Cards, Numbering Them Later When The Whole Set Is Complete. Every Card Is Rewritten Many Times.