I Don't Think Two People Could Have

How We Dress Is, As Far As I Can Tell, The Only Inescapably Public Choice That We Have. People Don't Need To Know What You Eat, People Don't Need To Know Who You Have Sex With. But There's No Escaping What You Wear And The Fact That You've Chosen It. Even If You Insist That You Don't Care About Fashion, That's Your Statement. It's Really One Realm Of Life Where You Are Forced To Make Your Own Statement.

Like My Hero Virginia Woolf, I Do Lack Confidence. I Always Find That The Novel I'm Finishing, Even If It's Turned Out Fairly Well, Is Not The Novel I Had In My Mind. I Think A Lot Of Writers Must Negotiate This, And If They Don't Admit It, They're Not Being Honest.

I Revise Constantly, As I Go Along And Then Again After I've Finished A First Draft. Few Of My Novels Contain A Single Sentence That Closely Resembles The Sentence I First Set Down. I Just Find That I Have To Keep Zapping And Zapping The English Language Until It Starts To Behave In Some Way That Vaguely Matches My Intentions.

The Kiss Was Innocent--innocent Enough--but It Was Also Full Of Something Not Unlike What Virginia Wants From London, From Life; It Was Full Of A Love Complex And Ravenous, Ancient, Neither This Nor That. It Will Serve As This Afternoon's Manifestation Of The Central Mystery Itself, The Elusive Brightness That Shines From The Edges Of Certain Dreams; The Brightness Which, When We Awaken, Is Already Fading From Our Minds, And Which We Rise In The Hope Of Finding, Perhaps Today, This New Day In Which Anything Might Happen, Anything At All.

Here Is The World, And You Live In It, And Are Grateful. You Try To Be Grateful.