What Terrorists Gain, Novelists Lose.

Years After I'd Seen Him For The Last Time I Found Myself Thinking Of Him Unexpectedly And Often. You Know How Certain Places Grow Powerful In The Mind With Passing Time. In Those Early Morning Dreams When I Come Back To Bed After A Sleepy Pee And Fall Quickly Into The Narrow End Of The Night, There Is One Set Of Streets I Keep Returning To, One Dim Mist Of Railroad Rooms And Certain Figures Reappear, Borderline Ghosts.

The Music I Like Best Is Kind Of Frozen In My Mind From The Sixties And Seventies. I Still Listen To The Same Jazz Music I Listened To When I Was Eighteen Years Old, And Like And Admire It Just As Much.

In This Century The Writer Has Carried On A Conversation With Madness. We Might Almost Say Of The Twentieth-century Writer That He Aspires To Madness. Some Have Made It, Of Course, And They Hold Special Places In Our Regard. To A Writer, Madness Is A Final Distillation Of Self, A Final Editing Down. It's The Drowning Out Of False Voices.

As Belief Shrinks From The World, It Is More Necessary Than Ever That Someone Believe. Wild-eyed Men In Caves. Nuns In Black. Monks Who Do Not Speak. We Are Left To Believe. Fools, Children. Those Who Have Abandoned Belief Must Still Believe In Us. They Are Sure They Are Right Not To Believe But They Know Belief Must Not Fade Completely. Hell Is When No One Believes.

I Didn’t Do Anything. I Don’t Have An Explanation, I Don’t Know Why I Wanted To Write. I Did Some Short Stories At That Time, But Very Infrequently. I Quit My Job Just To Quit. I Didn’t Quit My Job To Write Fiction. I Just Didn’t Want To Work Anymore