Please, God, Send Me Something To Adore.

I Was Living My Own Future And My Brother's Lost One As Well. I Represented Him Here Just As He Represented Me There, In Some Unguessable Other Place. His Move From Life To Death Might Resemble My Stepping Into The Kitchen - Into Its Soft Nowhere Quality And Foggy Hum. I Breathed The Dark Air. If I Had At That Moment A Sense Of Calm Kindly Death While My Heart Beat And My Lungs Expanded, He Might Know A Similar Sense Of Life In The Middle Of His Ongoing Death.

Virginia Woolf's Great Novel, 'mrs. Dalloway,' Is The First Great Book I Ever Read. I Read It Almost By Accident When I Was In High School, When I Was 15 Years Old.

Virginia Woolf Came Along In The Early Part Of The Century And Essentially Said Through Her Writing, Yes, Big Books Can Be Written About The Traditional Big Subjects. There Is War. There Is The Search For God. These Are All Very Important Things.

We’d Hoped For Love Of A Different Kind, Love That Knew And Forgave Our Human Frailty But Did Not Miniaturize Our Grander Ideas Of Ourselves.

At The Risk, Then, Of Being Shunned By Some Of My Gloomier Peers, I Venture To Tell You That Writers Work Like Demons, Suffer Greatly, And Are Also Happy, In Unmistakable Ways, Some Of The Time. If We Had No Knowledge Of Happiness, Our Novels Wouldn't Sufficiently Resemble Real Life. Some Of Us Are Even Made A Little Bit Happy, On Occasion, By The Writing Process Itself. I Mean, Really, If There Wasn't Some Sort Of Enjoyment To Be Derived, Would Any Of Us Keep Doing It?