In My View, Nineteen Pounds

One Of The Convenient Things About Literature Is That, Despite Copyrights [...] A Book Belongs To The Reader As Well As To The Writer.

Something Amazing Happens When The Rest Of The World Is Sleeping. I Am Glued To My Chair. I Forget That I Ever Wanted To Do Anything But Write. The Crowded City, The Crowded Apartment, And The Crowded Calendar Suddenly Seem Spacious. Three Or Four Hours Pass In A Moment; I Have No Idea What Time It Is, Because I Never Check The Clock. If I Chose To Listen, I Could Hear The Swish Of Taxis Bound For Downtown Bars Or The Soft Saxophone Riffs That Drift From A Neighbor's Window, But Nothing Gets Through. I Am Suspended In A Sensory Deprivation Tank, And The Very Lack Of Sensation Is Delicious.

I Have Always Felt That The Action Most Worth Watching Is Not At The Center Of Things But Where Edges Meet. I Like Shorelines, Weather Fronts, International Borders. There Are Interesting Frictions And Incongruities In These Places, And Often, If You Stand At The Point Of Tangency, You Can See Both Sides Better Than If You Were In The Middle Of Either One.

When I Write After Dark", Observed Cyril Connolly, "the Shades Of Evening Scatter Their Purple Through My Prose

When The Irish Novelist John Mcgahern Was A Child, His Sisters Unlaced And Removed One Of His Shoes While He Was Reading. He Did Not Stir. They Placed A Straw Hat On His Head. No Response. Only When They Took Away The Wooden Chair On Which He Was Sitting Did He, As He Puts It, 'wake Out Of The Book'.