How Easy Life Is When It's Easy,

Never In His Life Had Occasion To Ask Himself, "why Are Things The Way They Are?" Why Should He Bother, When The Way They Were Was Always Perfect? Why Are Things The Way They Are? The Question To Which There Is No Answer, And Up Till Then He Was So Blessed He Didn't Even Know The Question Existed.

For Someone Whose Roots In America Were Strong But Only Inches Deep, And Who Had No Experience, Such As A Catholic Child Might, Of An Awesome Hierarchy That Was Real And Felt, Baseball Was A Kind Of Secular Church That Reached Into Every Class And Region Of The Nation And Bound Millions Upon Millions Of Us Together In Common Concerns, Loyalties, Rituals, Enthusiasms, And Antagonisms. Baseball Made Me Understand What Patriotism Was About, At Its Best.

Each Book Starts From Ashes Really. I Don't Feel That I Have This To Say Or That To Say Or This Story To Tell Or That Story To Tell, But I Want To Be Occupied With The Writing Process While I'm Living.

When You Decide 'to Be A Writer,' You Don't Have The Faintest Idea Of What The Work Is Like. When You Begin, You Write Spontaneously Out Of Your Limited Experience Of Both The Unwritten World And The Written World. You're Full Of Naïve Exuberance. 'i Am A Writer!' Rather Like The Excitement Of 'i Have A Lover!' But Working At It Nearly Every Day For Fifty Years – Whether It Is Being The Writer Or Being The Lover – Turns Out To Be An Extremely Taxing Job And Hardly The Pleasantest Of Human Activities.

For Discipline Is Imposed Not Just On Oneself But On Those In One's Orbit.