He Tried To Imagine The Sound Of

What Libraries Give You Is All Three Tenses - The Past Tense - The Present Tense In Which We Live And The Future That We Can Only Imagine. These Places Have Teachers Who Are Living And Dead And We Are Lucky To Have Them. If I Sit Here And Read Aristotle, He Is Speaking To Me Across A Thousand Years - More Than A Thousand Years. That Sense That I Am In The Company Of The Great Greatest People Who Ever Lived Is A Humbling Experience But A Liberating Experience.

There Is Something Elegantly Sinister About The Rolling Stones. They Sit Before You At A Press Conference Like Five Unfolding Switchblades; Their Faces Set In Rehearsed Snarls; Their Hair Studiously Unkempt And Matted; Their Clothes Part Of Some Private Conceit; And The Way They Walk And Talk And The Songs They Sing All Become Part Of Some Long Mean Reach For The Jugular.

The Goal Is To Be Both Disciplined And Loose, So That The Writing Does Not Turn Into A Task Or A Chore. To Leave Myself Behind, Along With The Mechanics, And Disappear Into The Lives Of My Characters.

There Is A Growing Feeling That Perhaps Texas Is Really Another Country, A Place Where The Skies, The Disasters, The Diamonds, The Politicians, The Women, The Fortunes, The Football Players And The Murders Are All Bigger Than Anywhere Else.

It's Odd Being An American Now. Most Of Us Are Peaceful, But Here We Are Again, In Our Fifth Major War Of This Century.