I've Moved Away From That Sort Of

[t]o Love A Specific Person, And To Identify With His Or Her Struggles And Joys As If They Were Your Own, You Have To Surrender Some Of Your Self.

An Ink Bottle, Which Now Seems Impossibly Quaint, Was Still Thinkable As A Symbol In 1970.

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.

The Novelist Has More And More To Say To Readers Who Have Less And Less Time To Read: Where To Find The Energy To Engage A Culture In Crisis When The Crisis Consists In The Impossibility Of Engaging With The Culture?

The Writer’s Life Is A Life Of Revisions.