People Have Thoughts They’d Sooner Not Have.

I Just Believed It Easily, The Way You Might Believe And In Fact Remember That You Once Had Another Set Of Teeth, Now Vanished But Real In Spite Of That. Until One Day, One Day When I May Even Have Been In My Teens, I Knew With A Dim Sort Of Hole In My Insides That Now I Didn't Believe It Anymore.

As Soon As A Man And Woman Of Almost Any Age Are Alone Together Within Four Walls It Is Assumed That Anything May Happen. Spontaneous Combustion, Instant Fornication, Triumph Of The Senses. What Possibilities Men And Women Must See In Each Other To Infer Such Dangers. Or, Believing In The Dangers, How Often They Must Think About The Possibilities.

A Story Is Not Like A Road To Follow... It's More Like A House. You Go Inside And Stay There For A While, Wandering Back And Forth And Settling Where You Like And Discovering How The Room And Corridors Relate To Each Other, How The World Outside It Altered By Being Viewed From These Windows.

It Must Have Meant Something, Though, That At This Turn Of My Life I Grabbed Up A Book. Because It Was In Books That I Would Find, For The Next Few Years, My Lovers. They Were Men, Not Boys. They Were Self-possessed And Sardonic, With A Ferocious Streak In Them, Reserves Of Gloom.

It's Not Possible To Advise A Young Writer Because Every Young Writer Is So Different. You Might Say, "read," But A Writer Can Read Too Much And Be Paralyzed. Or, "don't Read, Don't Think, Just Write," And The Result Could Be A Mountain Of Drivel. If You're Going To Be A Writer You'll Probably Take A Lot Of Wrong Turns And Then One Day Just End Up Writing Something You Have To Write, Then Getting It Better And Better Just Because You Want It To Be Better, And Even When You Get Old And Think, "there Must Be Something Else People Do," You Won't Be Able To Quit.