Is Any Novelist Going To Recognize The

Often The Grind Of Book Promotion Wearies You Of Your Own Book - Though At The Same Time This Frees You From Its Clutches.

We Live With Such Easy Assumptions, Don't We? For Instance, That Memory Equals Events Plus Time. But It's All Much Odder Than This. Who Was It Said That Memory Is What We Thought We'd Forgotten? And It Ought To Be Obvious To Us That Time Doesn't Act As A Fixative, Rather As A Solvent. But It's Not Convenient--- It's Not Useful--- To Believe This; It Doesn't Help Us Get On With Our Lives; So We Ignore It.

Back Then, Things Were Plainer: Less Money, No Electronic Devices, Little Fashion Tyranny, No Girlfriends. There Was Nothing To Distract Us From Our Human And Filial Duty Which Was To Study, Pass Exams, Use Those Qualifications To Find A Job, And Then Put Together A Way Of Life Unthreateningly Fuller Than That Of Our Parents, Who Would Approve, While Privately Comparing It To Their Own Earlier Lives, Which Had Been Simpler, And Therefore Superior.

Very Few Of My Characters Are Based On People I've Known. It Is Too Constricting.

This Was Another Of Our Fears: That Life Wouldn't Turn Out To Be Like Literature.