I Find It A Huge Strain To

If You Read The Biographies Of People Who Have Written Good Books, You Often See The Point Where They Suddenly Come Into Themselves, And Those Weeks In The Spring Of 1997 Were When I Came Into Myself As A Writer. They Feel Like Some Of The Best Weeks Of Writing I’ll Ever Have. The Discovery That I Could Write Better About Something As Trivial As An Ordinary Family Dinner Than I Could About The Exploding Prison Population Of The United States, And The Corporatization Of American Life, And All The Other Things I’d Been Trying To Do, Was A Real Revelation.

Mr. Franzen Said He And Mr. Wallace, Over Years Of Letters And Conversations About The Ethical Role Of The Novelist, Had Come To The Joint Conclusion That The Purpose Of Writing Fiction Was “a Way Out Of Loneliness.” (ny Times Article On The Memorial Service Of David Foster Wallace.)

I Think We Live In An Era Of Problems That, If You Step Back And Look At Them Globally, Can't Be Solved. One Response To That Is, "oh Well, It's All Hopeless. The Natural World Is Getting Wrecked, Birds Are Disappearing, The Planet Is Warming And So Anything We Might Do On A Smaller Scale Is Meaningless."

The Correction, When It Finally Came, Was Not An Overnight Bursting Of A Bubble But A Much More Gentle Letdown, A Year-long Leakage Of Value From Key Financial Markets, A Contraction Too Gradual To Generate Headlines And Too Predictable To Seriously Hurt Anybody But Fools And The Working Poor.

Robin Turned And Looked Straight Into Her. "what's Life For?" "i Don't Know." "i Don't Either. But I Don't Think It's About Winning.