Throughout My Career I've Struggled To Encourage

It Was Like When You Make A Move In Chess And Just As You Take Your Finger Off The Piece, You See The Mistake You've Made, And There's This Panic Because You Don't Know Yet The Scale Of Disaster You've Left Yourself Open To.

I Started As A Songwriter And Wanted To Be Like Leonard Cohen. I've Always Seen My Stories As Enlarged Songs.

When I Got To 40 Or So... I Had The Sense When I Looked Back Over My Life I Would Actually See A Mess Of Decisions, A Few Of Which I Had Thought About, Some Of Which I Had Sort Of Stumbled On, And Many That I Had No Control Over Whatsoever.

Now Naturally, Like Many Of Us, I Have A Reluctance To Change Too Much Of The Old Ways.

I Actually Dislike, More Than Many People, Working Through Literary Allusion. I Just Feel That There's Something A Bit Snobbish Or Elitist About That. I Don't Like It As A Reader, When I'm Reading Something. It's Not Just The Elitism Of It; It Jolts Me Out Of The Mode In Which I'm Reading. I've Immersed Myself In The World And Then When The Light Goes On I'm Supposed To Be Making Some Kind Of Literary Comparison To Another Text. I Find I'm Pulled Out Of My Kind Of Fictional World, I'm Asked To Use My Brain In A Different Kind Of Way. I Don't Like That.