I Want To Feel That Art Is

I Have Found That The Characters In My Novels Stay With Me After A Book Has Ended. I Know Them In Some Sense. I Never Map Anything Out. I Just Think Until I Am Secure In The Voice Of One Of Them, And Then Let The Character Unfold.

I Think I Am Like Most People In Letting Myself Worry About Things That Didn't Matter. Concepts Like Quotidian And Humdrum Prevented Me For Years From Really Absorbing The Miraculous Strangeness Of Bombing Around A Star On A Tottering Planet, Of Watching The World Unfold In Time.

Religion, If It Is Genuine, Is So Profoundly Interwoven With Individual Thought And Experience That It Is No More Exhaustible Than Consciousness Itself. And Fiction Whose Purpose Is Didactic Is Bad No Matter Whether The Matter To Be "taught" Is Christianity Or The World View Of Ayn Rand. It Seems Often To Be Assumed By Writers That Religion Is A Pose, Meant To Deceive Oneself Or Others, Or That It Is A Bad Patch On Doubt Or Complexity. This Is Only Convention, However. The Writers I Know Have A Much Deeper Engagement With The Real Issues Of Religion.

A Little Too Much Anger, Too Often Or At The Wrong Time, Can Destroy More Than You Would Ever Imagine.

Then There Is The Matter Of My Mother's Abandonment Of Me. Again, This Is The Common Experience. They Walk Ahead Of Us, And Walk Too Fast, And Forget Us, They Are So Lost In Thoughts Of Their Own, And Soon Or Late They Disappear. The Only Mystery Is That We Expect It To Be Otherwise.