Maybe The Best Thing Would Be To

I Was Gushing And I Knew It. I Surprised Myself With My Eagerness To Please, Felt Myself Saying Too Much, Explaining Too Much, Overinvolved And Overexcited In The Way You Are When You're A Kid And You Think You've Found A Soul Mate In The New Boy Down The Street And You Feel Yourself Drawn By The Force Of The Courtship And So Act As You Don't Normally Do And A Lot More Openly Than You May Even Want To.

Nothing Has A More Sinister Effect On Art Than The Artist's Desire To Prove That He's Good. The Terrible Temptation Of Idealism! You Must Achieve Mastery Over Your Idealism, Over Your Virtue As Well As Over Your Vice, Aesthetic Mastery Over Everything That Drives You To Write In The First Place - Your Outrage, Your Politics, Your Grief, Your Love!

Sex Is All The Enchantment Required. Do Men Find Women So Enchanting Once The Sex Is Taken Out? Does Anyone Find Anyone That Enchanting Unless They Have Sexual Business With Them? Who Else Are You Enchanted By? Nobody.

--nor Had I Understood Til Then How The Shameless Vanity Of Utter Fools Can So Strongly Determine The Fate Of Others

When You Decide 'to Be A Writer,' You Don't Have The Faintest Idea Of What The Work Is Like. When You Begin, You Write Spontaneously Out Of Your Limited Experience Of Both The Unwritten World And The Written World. You're Full Of Naïve Exuberance. 'i Am A Writer!' Rather Like The Excitement Of 'i Have A Lover!' But Working At It Nearly Every Day For Fifty Years – Whether It Is Being The Writer Or Being The Lover – Turns Out To Be An Extremely Taxing Job And Hardly The Pleasantest Of Human Activities.