You Can't Tell People How To Feel

I Read A Lot, But At The Same Time I'm Not A Particularly Good Or Diligent Or Discriminating Reader. I Go Through Maybe Close To A Thousand Or More Books A Year, But A Lot Of Times I'll Only Read Bits And Pieces Of Any One Individual Text.

I Always Worry That Knowing Too Much About A Novel Or A Story Early On In Writing Will Close It Down - It Feels Fatalistic In Some Way.

I Can't Understand How People Can Settle For Having Just One Life. I Remember We Were In English Class And We Were Talking About That Poem By - That One Guy. David Frost. 'two Roads Diverged In A Yellow Wood-' You Know This Poem, Right? 'two Roads Diverged In A Yellow Wood, And Sorry I Could Not Travel Both And Be One Traveler, Long I Stood And Looked Down One As Far As I Could, To Where It Bent In The Undergrowth-" "i Loved That Poem. But I Remember Thinking To Myself: Why? How Come You Can't Travel Both? That Seemed Really Unfair To Me.

I Usually Have More Than One Thing I'm Working On At Once -- I've Been Working On Three Different Novels. When I Get Stuck On One, I Hop Back And Forth. It's Sort Of Freeing: I Can Say I'm Abandoning This Thing That I Hate Forever And I'm Moving On To Something That's Good. I'll Find That I'll Go Back To [the Other Project] In A Day Or A Week And Like It Again. But That Moment Of Wanting To Trash Something -- That Virginia Woolf Moment When You Have To Be Stopped From Filling Your Pocket With Stones -- Comes Pretty Regularly For Me. Switching Is Probably A Good Thing.

It Doesn't Matter What You Do. In The End, You Are Going To Be Judged, And All The Times That You're Not At Your Most Dignified Are The Ones That Will Be Recalled In All Their Vivid, Heartbreaking Detail. And Then Of Course These Things Will Be Distorted And Exaggerated And Replayed Over And Over, Until Eventually They Turn Into The Essence Of You: Your Cartoon.