Until I Was 42, I Could Fit

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.

My Dream Has Always Been To Suspend Myself In Space When I Write, And Lying Horizontal In Bed Is The Closest To Doing That.

The Web: Yet Another Total Disorientation That Becomes Status Quo Without Anyone Realizing It.

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.

I Write The Way You Might Arrange Flowers. Not Every Try Works, But Each One Launches Another. Every Constraint, Even Dullness, Frees Up A New Design.