Every Golden Age Is As

I Might Spend 100 Pages Trying To Get To Know The World I'm Writing About: Its Contours, Who Are My Main Characters, What Are Their Relationships To Each Other, And Just Trying To Get A Sense Of What And Who This Book Is About. Usually Around That Point Of 100 Pages, I Start To Feel Like I'm Lost, I Have Too Much Material, It's Time To Start Making Some Choices. It's Typically At That Point That I Sit Down And Try To Make A Formal Outline And Winnow Out What's Not Working And What I'm Most Interested In, Where The Story Seems To Be Going.

I Smoked And Looked Down At The Bottom Of Pittsburgh For A Little While, Watching The Kids Playing Tiny Baseball, The Distant Figures Of Dogs Snatching At A Little Passing Car, A Miniature Housewife On Her Back Porch Shaking Out A Snippet Of Red Rug, And I Made A Sudden, Frightened Vow Never To Become That Small, And To Devote Myself To Getting Bigger And Bigger And Bigger.

A Delicate, Inexorable Lattice Of Inferences Began To Assemble Themselves, Like A Crystal, In The Old Man's Mind, Shivering, Catching The Light In Glints And Surmises.

Literature, Like Magic, Has Always Been About The Handling Of Secrets, About The Pain, The Destruction, And The Marvelous Liberation That Can Result When They Are Revealed. If A Writer Doesn't Give Away Secrets, His Own Or Those Of The People He Loves, If He Doesn't Court Disapproval, Reproach And General Wrath, Whether Of Friends, Family Or Party Apparatchiks... The Result Is Pallid, Inanimate, A Lump Of Earth.

Every Messiah Fails, The Moment He Tries To Redeem Himself.