Gender Mattered A Whole Lot

I Have Learned That The Consequences Of Our Past Actions Are Always Interesting; I Have Learned To View The Present With A Forward-looking Eye.

So We Dream On. Thus We Invent Our Lives. We Give Ourselves A Sainted Mother, We Make Our Father A Hero; And Someone’s Older Brother And Someone’s Older Sister – They Become Our Heroes Too. We Invent What We Love And What We Fear. There Is Always A Brave Lost Brother – And A Little Lost Sister, Too. We Dream On And On: The Best Hotel, The Perfect Family, The Resort Life. And Our Dreams Escape Us Almost As Vividly As We Can Imagine Them.

I Have A Process That I Seem To Always, To Some Degree, As A Writer, Adhere To, But I Certainly Have Never Imposed The Way I Write A Novel On My Students. When I Had Students, I Never Said, "you Should Never Start Writing A Novel Until You Have The Last Sentence." I Never Did That, And I Wouldn't Do It Now, But People Now Seem So Interested In The Process [of Writing Fiction] That I Have To Constantly Make It Clear When I Describe Mine That I'm Not Being Prescriptive. I'm Not Proselytizing.

Is It A Democratic Society That Condemns People To The Accident Of Conception? What Are We-monkeys? If You Expect People To Be Responsible For Their Children, You Have To Give Them The Right To Choose Whether Or Not To Have Children. What Are You People Thinking Of? You're Not Only Crazy! You're Ogres!

There Was No Manifestation Of Contemporary Culture That Did Not Indicate To My Grandmother How Steadfast Was The Nation's Decline, How Merciless Our Mental And Moral Deterioration, How Swiftly All-embracing Our Final Decadence. I Never Saw Her Read A Book Again; But She Referred To Books Often - As If They Were Shrines And Cathedrals Of Learning That Television Had Plundered And Then Abandoned.