It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
The idea that I’m going to have to sit down to write some fiction where I’m going to have to think of a plot would really scare me, because it would come out a mess.
I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not.
I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.
I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.
I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.
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