It Is Really Irritating To Work With

Names Generate Meaning In A Short Amount Of Space — They Provoke Thoughts, Questions. That's Something I Like Doing. Of Course, You Have To Be Careful. Sometimes It Can Alienate The Reader, It Can Be Another Level Of Mediation, To Make A Character Carry The Great Burden Of A Metaphoric Name. The Character Can Be A Device Before He Or She Becomes A Person, And That Can Be A Bad Thing For A Writer Who Wants To Offer Up A Kind Of Emotional Proximity In The Work. It's A Constant Struggle, The Desire To Be Playful And The Desire To Communicate On Some Very Stark Emotional Level.

My First Job Is To Write A Book That I Believe Is Compelling And Deserves The Long Sustained Attention That Any Novel Requires, And To Worry About The Commerce Only Late In The Game.

She Looks At Herself In The Mirror. The Idea Is To Look Sexy Again. And For Whom Exactly? Yourself, Of Course. Yes, Well, That's All Wonderfully Self-affirming And Very Strong-minded As Any Decent Woman Should Be These Days, But Let's Just Face Facts Here And Say That When A Woman - No, When A Person Is Thinking About Feeling Sexy, It Is Always With The Idea Of Someone Else In Mind.

Baseball Is The Slow Creation Of Something Beautiful. It Is The Almost Boringly Paced Accumulation Of What Seems Slight Or Incidental Into An Opera Of Bracing Suspense. The Game Will Threaten Never To End, Until Suddenly It Forces You To Marvel At How It Came To Be Where It Is And To Wonder At How Far It Might Go. It’s The Drowsy Metamorphosis Of The Dull Into The Indescribable.

I Think A Fairly Common Behavior Among Fiction Writers Is That They Want To Help. They're Generally Charitable People. They're Interested In The World. They're Curious, They're Empathetic. They Understand Suffering. They Don't Turn Away From That. But What They Do Is Essentially Useless. Except For The Sake Of The Thing Itself.