The Art Of Living Your

Construed As Turf, Home Just Seems A Provisional Claim, A Designation You Make Upon A Place, Not One It Makes On You. A Certain Set Of Buildings, A Glimpsed, Smudged Window-view Across A Schoolyard, A Musty Aroma Sniffed Behind A Garage When You Were A Child, All Of Which Come Crowding In Upon Your Latter-day Senses -- Those Are Pungent Things And Vivid, Even Consoling. But To Me They Are Also Inert And Nostalgic And Unlikely To Connect You To The Real, To That Essence Art Can Sometimes Achieve, Which Is Permanence.

And I Think That In Myself (and Perhaps Evident In What I Write) Fear Of Loss And The Corresponding Instinct To Protect Myself Against Loss Are Potent Forces.

In Order To Write Novels For A Living - It's Not Pathological, But I Do Think And Worry And Brood And Fidget About Stuff That I'm Working On.

Reading Is Probably What Leads Most Writers To Writing.

It's Been My Habit Of Mind, Over These Years, To Understand That Every Situation In Which Human Beings Are Involved Can Be Turned On Its Head. Everything Someone Assures Me To Be True Might Not Be. Every Pillar Of Belief The World Rests On May Or May Not Be About To Explode. Most Things Don't Stay The Way They Are Very Long. Knowing This, However, Has Not Made Me Cynical. Cynical Means Believing That Good Isn't Possible; And I Know For A Fact That Good Is. I Simply Take Nothing For Granted And Try To Be Ready For The Change That's Soon To Come.