I Didn't Read A Serious Book Until

If Sportswriting Teaches You Anything, And There Is Much Truth To It As Well As Plenty Of Lies, It Is That For Your Life To Be Worth Anything You Must Sooner Or Later Face The Possibility Of Terrible, Searing Regret. Though You Must Also Manage To Avoid It Or Your Life Will Be Ruined.

I Had A Tourette's Period. And Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Things Would Get In My Brain That I Couldn't Get Out Of My Brain.

A Reader Is Entitled To Believe What He Or She Believes Is Consonant With The Facts Of The Book. It Is Not Unusual That Readers Take Away Something That Is Spiritually At Variance From What I Myself Experienced. That's Not To Say Readers Make Up The Book They Want. We All Have To Agree On The Facts. But Readers Bring Their Histories And All Sets Of Longings. A Book Will Pluck The Strings Of Those Longings Differently Among Different Readers.

Literature Should Not Be Exclusive, It Should Be Inclusive. My General View Is That You Can't, Based On Your Own Experience, Project What A Book Will Do For Someone Else. That's Why I Don't Review Books.

Finally I Do Like Best Of All Stories Whose Necessity Is In The Implied Recognition That Someplace Out There There Exists An Urgency-a Chaos-, An Insanity, A Misrule Of Some Dire Sort Which Can End Life As We Know It But For The Fact That This Very Story Is Written, This Order Found, This Style Determined, The Worst Averted, And We Are Beneficiaries Of That Order By Being Readers