In The End, The Only Thing The

The Goal Is To Be Both Disciplined And Loose, So That The Writing Does Not Turn Into A Task Or A Chore. To Leave Myself Behind, Along With The Mechanics, And Disappear Into The Lives Of My Characters.

What Libraries Give You Is All Three Tenses - The Past Tense - The Present Tense In Which We Live And The Future That We Can Only Imagine. These Places Have Teachers Who Are Living And Dead And We Are Lucky To Have Them. If I Sit Here And Read Aristotle, He Is Speaking To Me Across A Thousand Years - More Than A Thousand Years. That Sense That I Am In The Company Of The Great Greatest People Who Ever Lived Is A Humbling Experience But A Liberating Experience.

There Are 10,000 Books In My Library, And It Will Keep Growing Until I Die. This Has Exasperated My Daughters, Amused My Friends And Baffled My Accountant. If I Had Not Picked Up This Habit In The Library Long Ago, I Would Have More Money In The Bank Today; I Would Not Be Richer.

My Ambition Was To Embrace Those General Qualities That Ernest Hemingway, A Former Newspaperman, Once Said Should Be Present In All Good Books: 'the Good And The Bad, The Ecstasy, The Remorse And Sorrow, The People And The Places And How The Weather Was.'

The Best Newspapermen I Know Are Those Most Thrilled By The Daily Pump Of City Room Excitements; They Long Fondly For A Good Murder; They Pray That Assassinations, Wars, Catastrophes Break On Their Editions.