Everybody’s Gotta Learn, Nobody’s Born Knowing.

Naturally, You Don't Sit Down In "white Hot Inspiration" And Write With A Burning Flame In Front Of You. But Since I Knew I Could Never Be Happy Being Anything But A Writer, And Mockingbird Put Itself Together For Me So Accommodatingly, I Kept At It Because I Knew It Had To Be My First Novel, For Better Or For Worse.

Now, 75 Years Later In An Abundant Society Where People Have Laptops, Cell Phones, Ipods, And Minds Like Empty Rooms, I Still Plod Along With Books. Instant Information Is Not For Me. I Prefer To Search Library Stacks Because When I Work To Learn Something, I Remember It. And, Oprah, Can You Imagine Curling Up In Bed To Read A Computer? Weeping For Anna Karenina And Being Terrified By Hannibal Lecter, Entering The Heart Of Darkness With Mistah Kurtz, Having Holden Caulfield Ring You Up — Some Things Should Happen On Soft Pages, Not Cold Metal.

They're Ugly, But Those Are The Facts Of Life.

I'm Gonna Be A New Kind Of Clown. I'm Gonna Stand In The Middle Of The Ring And Laugh At The Folks.

That Proves Something- That A Gang Of Wild Animals Can Be Stopped, Simply Because They're Still Human.