You Can Make Mean Anything.

Scratch Any Fortune And You'll Find Blood Only A Generation Or Two Back...child Labor In Mines Or Mills...slavery. Drugs. Stock Swindles. Wasting Nature With Clear-cuts, Pollution, Harvesting To Extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every Fortune Comes Out Of Something Unpleasant.

No, None Of Us Seem So Very Real. We're Only Supporting Characters In The Lives Of Each Other. Any Real Truth, Any Precious Fact Will Always Be Lost In A Mountain Of Shattered Make-believe.

You Can't Base Your Life On The Past Or The Present. You Have To Tell Me About Your Future.

I Try To Tell A Story The Way Someone Would Tell You A Story In A Bar, With The Same Kind Of Timing And Pacing.

Ideas Come At Any Moment -- Except When You Demand Them. Most Ideas Come While I'm Physically Active, At The Gym, With Friends, Gardening, So I Always Carry Pen And Paper. My First Draft Is Always Written In Longhand. But Once The First Dozen Chapters, More Like Short Stories, Are Written, Then Momentum Builds Until I Can't Leave The Project Until It's Done.