A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.
From Philip Roth
Nothing keeps its promise.
Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No.
I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.
Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.
For all I know, I am beginning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it's still even around.
I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.
My traducers propound my alleged malefaction as though I have spewed venom on women for half a century. But only a madman would go to the trouble of writing 31 books in order to affirm his hatred.
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1 perspectives