For Every Reader Who Dies Today, A

Imagine That Human Existence Is Defined By An Ache: The Ache Of Our Not Being, Each Of Us, The Center Of The Universe; Of Our Desires Forever Outnumbering Our Means Of Satisfying Them.

If You Read The Biographies Of People Who Have Written Good Books, You Often See The Point Where They Suddenly Come Into Themselves, And Those Weeks In The Spring Of 1997 Were When I Came Into Myself As A Writer. They Feel Like Some Of The Best Weeks Of Writing I’ll Ever Have. The Discovery That I Could Write Better About Something As Trivial As An Ordinary Family Dinner Than I Could About The Exploding Prison Population Of The United States, And The Corporatization Of American Life, And All The Other Things I’d Been Trying To Do, Was A Real Revelation.

When You Stay In Your Room And Rage Or Sneer Or Shrug Your Shoulders, As I Did For Many Years, The World And Its Problems Are Impossibly Daunting. But When You Go Out And Put Yourself In Real Relation To Real People, Or Even Just Real Animals, There’s A Very Real Danger That You Might End Up Loving Some Of Them. And Who Knows What Might Happen To You Then?

Fiction That Isn't An Author's Personal Adventure Into The Frightening Or The Unknown Isn't Worth Writing For Anything But Money.

I'm Not Too Concerned What Happens To My Books After I'm Dead. But I Am Very Concerned By What's Going On With The Culture Of Reading And Writing Nowadays.