Along The Way, He Or

The Fundamental Truth: A Baseball Game Is Nothing But A Great Slow Contraption For Getting You To Pay Attention To The Cadence Of A Summer Day.

I Don't Have A Problem With Many Uses Of The Word Genre, Just Certain Ones. I Have The Most Trouble When These Labels Are Used To Prevent Discussion, To Prevent A Work From Being Taken Seriously As Literature. When We Say "genre," We Generally Mean "something Crappy," Something That Would Be Sold In An Airport.

When I First Decided I Wanted To Be A Writer, When I Was 10, 11 Years Old, The Books That I Loved Obviously And Openly Fit That Description: They Came With Maps And Glossaries And Timelines - Books Like Lord Of The Rings, Dune, The Chronicles Of Narnia. I Imagined That's What Being A Writer Was: You Invented A World, And You Did It In A Very Detailed Way, And You Told Stories That Were Set In That World.

I Have Confused Ideas Of Deity, Heavily Influenced By Mind-altering Years Of Reading Science Fiction, That Do Not Often Trouble Me, But One Thing I Know For Certain, And Have Known Since The Age Of Five Or Six, Is That I Really Can't Stand The God Of Abraham. In Fact, I Consider Him To Constitute The Pattern To Which Every True Asshole I Have Ever Known In My Life Has Pretty Well Conformed.

Not Only Would I Never Want To Belong To Any Club That Would Have Me For A Member--if Elected I Would Wear Street Shoes Onto The Squash Court And Set Fire To The Ballroom Curtains.