He Who Completes A Quest Does Not

Nothing Is Wrong With You. You're Not Different. Everybody Feels As Bad As You Do: This Is Just What Writing A Novel Feels Like. To Write A Novel Is To Come In Contact With Raw, Primal Feelings, Hopes And Longings And Psychic Wounds, And Try To Make A Big Public Word-sculpture Out Of Them, And That Is A Crazy Hard Thing To Do.

I Don't Know If I've Ever Derived Such An Immediate Sense Of Calm And Well-being From Any Book As I Did From 'right Ho, Jeeves.' It Was Like I Was Pac-man And The Book Was A Power-up.

Oddly, The Meanings Of Books Are Defined For Me Much More By Their Beginnings And Middles Than They Are By Their Endings.

Every Year The Literary Press Praises Dozens If Not Hundreds Of Novels To The Skies, Asserting Explicitly Or Implicitly That These Books Will Probably Not Be Suffering Water Damage In The Basements Of Their Authors' Houses 20 Years From Now. But Historically, Anyway, That's Not The Way The Novelistic Ecology Works.

You Don't Want To Move Toward Some Utopian Literary Situation Where Everybody's Free Of All Conventions. That's Ridiculous! Conventions Are What You Need. You Have Nothing To Break Down If You Don't Have Conventions.