Because We Are All Poets

Novelists Tend To Go Off At 70, And I'm In A Funk About It, I've Got Myself Into A Real Paranoid Funk About It, How The Talent Dies Before The Body.

It Sounds Schmaltzy To Say, But Fiction Is Much More To Do With Love Than People Admit Or Acknowledge. The Novelist Has To Not Only Love His Characters - Which You Do, Without Even Thinking About It, Just As You Love Your Children. But Also To Love The Reader, And That's What I Mean By The Pleasure Principle.

Saul Bellow Says, Funny Enough, What French Think Of Your Work Is Tremendously Important. And It Is. It's More Than What The Italians, The Spanish, And The Germans Think. Somehow It's Still Got That Cultural Primacy. I Feel That Too: To Get Praised In France Is Better Than To Get Praised Anywhere Else.

The Democratic Party Represents The American Brain, And The Republicans Represent Not The American Heart, Or Soul, But The American Gut. The Argument Between Brain And Bowel, Everywhere Else In The Free World, Has Been Decided Long Ago In Favor Of Brain. But Americans Still - It Still Divides The Nation, This Question, Here In America.

Unless I Specifically Inform You Otherwise, I'm Always Smoking Another Cigarette.