There Is A Long Time In Me

I Begin By Writing Paragraphs That Don’t Have An Immediate Relation To A Plot. The Sound Of The Story Comes First.

My Job Is To Get People To Write Something Truthful, Something About Truth And Beauty - Wherever They Are - And To Understand How Literature Is Made. And Then If They Become Great Writers, That's Great, And Probably Has Nothing To Do With Me.

I Believe In A Kind Of Fidelity To Your Own Early Ideas; It's A Kind Of Antagonism In Me To Prevailing Fads.

My Language Limitations Here Are Real. My Vocabulary Is Adequate For Writing Notes And Keeping Journals But Absolutely Useless For An Active Moral Life. If I Really Knew This Language, There Would Surely Be In My Head, As There Is In Webster's Or The Dictionary Of American Slang, That Unreducible Verb Designed To Tell A Person Like Me What To Do Next.

I Don't Have Any Degrees. I Went To Hunter College One Year And New York University Another Year. It's Just On The Basis Of My Books That I've Been Hired At Any Of The Places I've Been.