Nothing's Lost Forever.

I Think That When You're Writing Plays, And I Think It's Also True With Novels, It Helps To Have An Ear For The Music Of Language, For What We Call Poetry, For The Sound Effects And The Way That The Sound Can Produce Sensual Feeling At Odds With Or Consonant With The Content Of The Work. Your Work Is Also Gorgeous Writing. It's Very Unfortunate When You Open A Novel That Everybody's Loving And It's Just, You Know, An Excruciatingly Bad Sentence.

I Could Give You Absolutely Sterling Advice On How To Avoid Writing, How When You Run Out Of Things To Do Other Than Going To Your Desk And Writing, When Every Closet Is Reorganized And You've Called Your Oldest Living Relative Twice In One Day To See What She's Up To And There Isn't An Unanswered E-mail Left On Your Computer Or You Simply Can't Bear To Answer Another One And There Is No Dignity, Not A Drop Left, In Any Further Evasion Of The Task At Hand, Namely Writing, Well, You Can Always Ask Your Dentist For A Root Canal Or Have An Accident In The Bathtub Instead.

Here's The Thing About Politics: It's Not An Expression Of Your Moral Purity And Your Ethics And Your Probity And Your Fond Dreams Of Some Utopian Future. Progressive People Constantly Fail To Get This.

That It Should Be The Questions And Shape Of A Life, Its Total Complexity Gathered, Arranged, And Considered, Which Matters In The End, Not Some Stamp Of Salvation Or Damnation That Disperses All The Complexity Into Some Unsatisfying Little Decision - The Balancing Of Scales.

I Certainly Wake Up Every Morning And Thank God That I'm Not A Novelist Because The Theater Is Tough, But Novel Writing Is Infinitely Harder. Especially With The Economics Of Serious Fiction Being What They Are In America.