The Writer Must Hew The

Comparing The Brooklyn That I Know With Manhattan Is Like Comparing A Comfortable And Complacent Duenna To Her More Brilliant And Neurotic Sister.

Wherever You Look There’s Meanness And Corruption. This Room, This Bottle Of Grape Wine, These Fruits In The Basket, Are All Products Of Profit And Loss. A Fellow Can’t Live Without Giving His Passive Acceptance To Meanness. Somebody Wears His Tail To A Frazzle For Every Mouthful We Eat And Every Stitch We Wear—and Nobody Seems To Know. Everybody Is Blind, Dumb, And Blunt-headed—stupid And Mean.

The Memories Of Childhood Have A Strange Shuttling Quality, And Areas Of Darkness Ring The Spaces Of Light. The Memories Of Childhood Are Like Clear Candles In An Acre Of Night, Illuminating Fixed Scenes From Surrounding Darkness.

All Men Are Lonely. But Sometimes It Seems To Me That We Americans Are The Loneliest Of All. Our Hunger For Foreign Places And New Ways Has Been With Us Almost Like A National Disease. Our Literature Is Stamped With A Quality Of Longing And Unrest, And Our Writers Have Been Great Wanderers.

I'm Not Explaining This Right. What Happened Was This. There Were These Beautiful Feelings And Loose Little Pleasures Inside Me. And This Woman Was Something Like An Assembly Line For My Soul. I Run These Little Pieces Of Myself Through Her And I Come Out Complete. Now Do You Follow Me?