Small Towns Harbor Small Imaginations.

When You're Five And You Hurt, You Make A Big Noise In The World. At Ten You Whimper. But By The Time You Make Fifteen You Begin To Eat The Poisoned Apples That Grow On Your Own Inner Tree Of Pain.

When We Blew The First Atomic Bomb At White Sands Near The End Of The War, Nobody Knew What Was Going To Happen. There Was A Theory That The Chain Reaction Would Continue Forever. And We Would Have Created A Little Tiny Sun Out There In The Desert That Would Burn Until The End Of The Universe. It Wasn't A Widely Held Theory But It Was A Theory That Nobody Had A Way Of Disproving. There Were People Who Thought It Wouldn't Go Off At All, That It Would Simply Sit Out There And Melt And Produce A Great Big Dirty Cloud Of Radioactivity. Nobody Knew.

It Is, After All, The Dab Of Grit That Seeps Into An Oyster's Shell That Makes The Pearl, Not Pearl-making Seminars With Other Oysters.

I Think It Is Harder To Write A Story That Appeals To The Intellect. But, When You Tie Onto One, You Can Do It Quite Deeply. It Really Depends On The Type Of Idea You Have To Begin With.

I Spend A Lot Of Time Parenting Because I'm Home. A Friend Of Mine Told Me That The Average Father Sees Each Kid An Average Of Twenty-two Minutes A Week, Which I Found Almost Unbelievable. Mine Are In My Hip Pocket All The Time. And I Like It That Way.