I'm Well Beyond Dyslexic: I Have No

I Grew Up To Have My Father's Looks, My Father's Speech Patterns, My Father's Posture, My Father's Opinions, And My Mother's Contempt For My Father.

I've Had Enormous Luck And Enormous Pleasure In Working In Such Forms As Movies And Plays That I Loved When I Was A Kid And I Just - Because I Could Always Write Dialogue, Because I Always Had A Sense Of How People Spoke. And Because I Had A Strong Narrative Sense; Growing Up And Loving Stories, Loving Novels, I Just Seem To Know How To Tell A Story And I Read A Lot, I Went To A Lot Of Movies, I Went To A Lot Of Plays, And It Rubbed Off On Me. And That's All. It Just Rubbed Off On Me.

My Success Was The Shock Of Recognition, Probably, Rather Than The Quality Of The Work. I Mean, The Quality May Have Been Fine, But There's A Lot Of Fine Work Out There. It Was The Fact That I Was Doing Something That At That Time, Nobody Else Was Doing, Except For Say, Mort Saul Out In San Francisco On The Hungry Eye, And "second City" Was Emerging Out In Chicago. Nothing In Print. It Was Basically Happening In Cabaret And Nothing In Fiction. And Certainly Nothing In New York In Cartoons.

We Are All Continually Embarking On First Drafts, In Every Aspect Of Our Lives.

Writing, I Explained, Was Mainly An Attempt To Out-argue One's Past; To Present Events In Such A Light That Battles Lost In Life Were Either Won On Paper Or Held To A Draw.