Most Of My Inspiration, If That's The

Writing Is Very Hard Work And Knowing What You're Doing The Whole Time.

I Prize The Depression, For Instance, Because I Learned The Value Of Things In The Depression That A Way People Who Don't Have To Worry About Such Things Never Learned To Prize It Really, I Believe.

The Point I Would Make Is That The Novelist And The Historian Are Seeking The Same Thing: The Truth – Not A Different Truth: The Same Truth – Only They Reach It, Or Try To Reach It, By Different Routes. Whether The Event Took Place In A World Now Gone To Dust, Preserved By Documents And Evaluated By Scholarship, Or In The Imagination, Preserved By Memory And Distilled By The Creative Process, They Both Want To Tell Us How It Was: To Re-create It, By Their Separate Methods, And Make It Live Again In The World Around Them.

I've Never Known, At Least A Modern Historical Instance, Where The Truth Wasn't Superior To Distortion In Every Way.

If You Want To Study Writing, Read Dickens