Don't Judge It. Just Write It. Don't

Fear Presides Over These Memories, A Perpetual Fear.of Course No Childhood Is Without Its Terrors, Yet I Wonder If I Would Have Been A Less Frightened Boy If Lindbergh Hadn't Been President Or If I Hadn't Been The Offspring Of Jews.

When I Have A First Draft, I Have A Floor Under My Feet That I Can Walk On. Then, Especially With The Help Of The Computer, Rewriting Is So Easy To Do With The Computer, Much Easier Than It Used To Be With The Typewriter. So The Books Go Through Numerous Drafts.

Nothing Has A More Sinister Effect On Art Than The Artist's Desire To Prove That He's Good. The Terrible Temptation Of Idealism! You Must Achieve Mastery Over Your Idealism, Over Your Virtue As Well As Over Your Vice, Aesthetic Mastery Over Everything That Drives You To Write In The First Place - Your Outrage, Your Politics, Your Grief, Your Love!

And Since We Don’t Just Forget Things Because They Don’t Matter But Also Forget Things Because They Matter Too Much Because Each Of Us Remembers And Forgets In A Pattern Whose Labyrinthine Windings Are An Identification Mark No Less Distinctive Than A Fingerprintit’s No Wonder That The Shards Of Reality One Person Will Cherish As A Biography Can Seem To Someone Else Who, Say, Happened To Have Eaten Some Ten Thousand Dinners At The Very Same Kitchen Table, To Be A Willful Excursion Into Mythomania

Turned The Wrong Way Around, The Relentless Unforeseen Was What We Schoolchildren Studied In "history", Harmless History, Where Everything Unexpected In Its Own Time Is Chronicled On The Page As Inevitable. The Terror Of The Unforeseen Is What The Science Of History Hides, Turning A Disaster Into An Epic.