The Thing That Makes Reading

In 25 Years Of Writing Novels, I've Never Had Anything That Felt Like Writer's Block.

The Job Of Taste Was To Thin The Insane Torrent Of Human Creativity Down To Manageable Levels. But The Job Of Appetite Was Never To Be Happy With Taste.

Only Keep Still, Wait, And Hear, And The World Will Open.

Time Passes, As The Novelist Says. The Single Most Useful Trick Of Fiction For Our Repair And Refreshment: The Defeat Of Time. A Century Of Family Saga And A Ride Up An Escalator Can Take The Same Number Of Pages. Fiction Sets Any Conversion Rate, Then Changes It In A Syllable. The Narrator’s Mother Carries Her Child Up The Stairs And The Reader Follows, For Days. But World War I Passes In A Paragraph. I Needed 125 Pages To Get From Labor Day To Christmas Vacation. In Six More Words, Here’s Spring.

The Desire To Live In Our Imagination Is Driven By This Suspicion That We're Disembodied Sensibilities Cobbled Into Our Bodies. That Idea Has Infused Most Of Human Thought Since The Very Beginning.