The Pleasure Of Jogging And Running Is

I Was Recently Asked What It Takes To Become A Writer. Three Things, I Answered: First, One Must Cultivate Incompetence At Almost Every Other Form Of Profitable Work. This Must Be Accompanied, Second, By A Haughty Contempt For All The Forms Of Work That One Has Established One Cannot Do. To These Two Must Be Joined, Third, The Nuttiness To Believe That Other People Can Be Made To Care About Your Opinions And Views And Be Charmed By The Way You State Them. Incompetence, Contempt, Lunacy—once You Have These In Place, You Are Set To Go.

I Should Prefer To Die Laughing, And, On More Than One Occasion, Thought I Might.

I Know How Many Days In Which I Have Just Answered E-mail, Had Three Phone Calls And A Two Hour Lunch. Poof, Gone. They Are Not Infrequent.

All Men And Women Are Born, Live, Suffer And Die; What Distinguishes Us One From Another Is Our Dreams, Whether They Be Dreams About Worldly Or Unworldly Things, And What We Do To Make Them Come About... We Do Not Choose To Be Born. We Do Not Choose Our Parents. We Do Not Choose Our Historical Epoch, The Country Of Our Birth, Or The Immediate Circumstances Of Our Upbringing. We Do Not, Most Of Us, Choose To Die; Nor Do We Choose The Time And Conditions Of Our Death. But Within This Realm Of Choicelessness, We Do Choose How We Live.

The Problem For Me Is That Reading Is, I Won't Say A Sacred, But Nevertheless A Pretty Serious Act.