There Is A Little Boy Inside The

It Is So Easy To Waste Our Lives: Our Days, Our Hours, Our Minutes. It Is So Easy To Take For Granted The Pale New Growth On An Evergreen, The Sheen Of The Limestone On Fifth Avenue, The Colour Of Our Kids’ Eyes, The Way The Melody In A Symphony Rises And Falls And Disappears And Rises Again. It Is So Easy To Exist Instead Of Live. Unless You Know There Is A Clock Ticking.

Downtime Is Where We Become Ourselves, Looking Into The Middle Distance, Kicking At The Curb, Lying On The Grass Or Sitting On The Stoop And Staring At The Tedious Blue Of The Summer Sky. I Don't Believe You Can Write Poetry, Or Compose Music, Or Become An Actor Without Downtime, And Plenty Of It, A Hiatus That Passes For Boredom But Is Really The Quiet Moving Of The Wheels Inside That Fuel Creativity.

I Think At Every Moment In The Last Probably 100 Years, When The Institutional Church Had The Opportunity To Do The Right Thing, They Did The Wrong Thing. They're A Dying Institution In Many Parts Of The World Because They Refuse To Ordain Women Or Married People. And Now They're A Dying Institution Because Some Of Their Members Did Enormous Harm To Young People And Instead Of Responding Aggressively With Humility, And With Love, And With The Confession Of Wrongdoing, They Tried To Spin It As Though They Were A Political Party, And That's Just Deplorable.

I'm Just Remembering Myself At 22 Or 23. I Was All Engine And No Steering. (laughter) I Had The Wheels But I Had No Steering. I Do Think It's True That When You're Younger, You're More Likely To Listen To All The Naysayers, And People Are Always Telling You How You Ought To Behave And What Kind Of Job You Should Get And How You Should Look.

I Never Think About Issues When I'm Working On A Novel. Issues Are Things That Happen To People In Sufficient Numbers To Elicit Widespread Attention; In Other Words, They're Just Life Happening. That's What I Think About: Life, And Telling A Story.