Many Good Poets Are Really Essayists Who

Writing Has To Do With Truth-telling. When You're Writing, Let's Say, An Essay For A Magazine, You Try To Tell The Truth At Every Moment. You Do Your Best To Quote People Accurately And Get Everything Right. Writing A Novel Is A Break From That: Freedom. When You're Writing A Novel, You Are In Charge; You Can Beef Things Up.

Friends, Both The Imaginary Ones You Build For Yourself Out Of Phrases Taken From A Living Writer, Or Real Ones From College, And Relatives, Despite All The Waste Of Ceremony And Fakery And The Fact That Out Of An Hour Of Conversation You May Have Only Five Minutes In Which The Old Entente Reappears, Are The Only Real Means For Foreign Ideas To Enter Your Brain.

I Did Not Know That The Planning For Biological And Chemical Warfare Was So Widespread In England, And Even In France Before France Fell. It Was News To Me That There Had Been Talk, Even In The First World War, Of Dropping Colorado Beetles On German Potato Crops And That Kind Of Thing.

When I Really Want To Be Soothed And Reminded Of Why People Bother To Fiddle With Sentences, I Often Read Poetry.

Footnotes Are The Finer-suckered Surfaces That Allow Testicular Paragraphs To Hold Fast To The Wider Reality Of The Library.