I Grew Up In The Sort Of

All The Literati Keep At Least One Imaginary Friend.

I Had This Fantasy Of Becoming A Neurosurgeon. You Know, The Normal Jewish Boy Fantasy, But I Wanted To Be A Neurosurgeon For Some Reason. So I Started In This Unpleasant Way. I Was An Assistant To The Coroner, Opening Up Corpses, Taking The Innards Out, Opening Skulls, Taking The Brains Out.

In General, In America, Every Discourse In Literature In 15 Minutes Degenerates Into A Conversation About Ethics, Morality And This And That. The Holocaust And The Consequences Of It. Well, I Find It Terribly Boring, Predictable And Unimportant, Because What Matters About Literature Is Esthetic Achievement.

If There Is Anything Good About Exile, It Is That It Teaches One Humility. It Accelerates One’s Drift Into Isolation, An Absolute Perspective. Into The Condition At Which All One Is Left With Is Oneself And One’s Language, With Nobody Or Nothing In Between. Exile Brings You Overnight Where It Would Normally Take A Lifetime To Go.

The Surest Defense Against Evil Is Extreme Individualism, Originality Of Thinking, Whimsicality, Even - If You Will - Eccentricity. That Is, Something That Can't Be Feigned, Faked, Imitated; Something Even A Seasoned Imposter Couldn't Be Happy With.