But Spending Your Life Concentrating On Death

The Great Thing About Novels Is That You Can Be As Unshy As You Want To Be. I'm Very Polite In Person. I Don't Want To Talk About Startling Or Upsetting Things With People.

I Certainly Felt I Had An Idea Of World War Ii, And It's Probably The Idea That Many People Share: There Was This Insane Aggressor, And There Was Really Only One Way To Proceed In Resisting Him. What I Didn't Realize Is That There Were Many Voices Belonging To Reasonable, Interesting, Complicated People Who Had A Different Way Of Interpreting The Possible Responses To The Hitlerian Menace.

As Soon As You Start Doing That - Changing Things - It Seems Self-evident To Me That You've Entered The World Of Make-believe. If You Pretend That It's True, And Use Your Own Name, You Are Misleading People. Fiction Is Looser And Wilder And Sometimes In The End More Self-revealing, Anyway.

Gandhi Was Such An Important Figure To The Pacifists Of The '30s, And He Was Such An Extraordinary Embodiment Of Nonviolence, That I Thought It Was Necessary To Have Him In There. When He Would Say Something About The War, It Was To Some Extent News - And He Was Sure To Have A Response That Was Different From That Of Other World Leaders.

You Can Tell It's A Poem Because It's Swimming In A Little Gel Pack Of White Space. That Shows It's A Poem.