You Cannot Find Peace By Avoiding Life,

Like The Morning You Walked Out Of That Old House, When You Were Eighteen And I Was, Well, I Had Just Turned Nineteen, Hadn't I? I Was A Nineteen-year-old And I Was In Love With Louis And I Was In Love With You, And I Thought I Had Never Seen Anything So Beautiful As The Sight Of You Walking Out A Glass Door In The Early Morning, Still Sleepy, In Your Underwear. Isn't It Strange?

What A Thrill, What A Shock, To Be Alive On A Morning In June, Prosperous, Almost Scandalously Privileged, With A Simple Errand To Run.

Love Is Deep, A Mystery - Who Wants To Understand Its Every Particular?

You Have Started The Book With This Bubble Over Your Head That Contains A Cathedral Full Of Fire - That Contains A Novel So Vast And Great And Penetrating And Bright And Dark That It Will Put All Other Novels Ever Written To Shame. And Then, As You Get Towards The End, You Begin To Realise, No, It's Just This Book.

At The Risk, Then, Of Being Shunned By Some Of My Gloomier Peers, I Venture To Tell You That Writers Work Like Demons, Suffer Greatly, And Are Also Happy, In Unmistakable Ways, Some Of The Time. If We Had No Knowledge Of Happiness, Our Novels Wouldn't Sufficiently Resemble Real Life. Some Of Us Are Even Made A Little Bit Happy, On Occasion, By The Writing Process Itself. I Mean, Really, If There Wasn't Some Sort Of Enjoyment To Be Derived, Would Any Of Us Keep Doing It?