Nothing Bad Can Happen To

Nothing Bad Can Happen To A Writer. Everything Is Material.

Suicide Is The Role You Write For Yourself. You Inhabit It And You Enact It. All Carefully Staged -- Where They Will Find You And How They Will Find You. But One Performance Only.

What I Would Really Love To Happen To Me Would Be If I Came Upon An Idea That Would Keep Me Busy Until I Die So I Wouldn't Have To Go Through The Business Of Thinking Up A New Book. But I Wouldn't Mind Writing A Long Book Which Is Going To Occupy Me For The Rest Of My Life.

I Think I Write Or Publish As Much As I Do Because I Can Bear Being Without A Book To Work On. But Routinely When I Finish A Book, I Think, "what Will I Do? Where Will I Get An Idea?" And A Kind Of Low-level Panic Sets In. And Then Eventually Something Happens. I Don't Know. If I Knew How It Happened I Would Repeat The Process, But I Don't Know - Something Just Occurs To Me.

For Someone Whose Roots In America Were Strong But Only Inches Deep, And Who Had No Experience, Such As A Catholic Child Might, Of An Awesome Hierarchy That Was Real And Felt, Baseball Was A Kind Of Secular Church That Reached Into Every Class And Region Of The Nation And Bound Millions Upon Millions Of Us Together In Common Concerns, Loyalties, Rituals, Enthusiasms, And Antagonisms. Baseball Made Me Understand What Patriotism Was About, At Its Best.