My Father Died In My Arms. That's

I Didn't Read A Serious Book Until I Was 19.

Maturity, As I Conceived It, Was Recognizing What Was Bad Or Peculiar In Life, Admitting It Has To Stay That Way, And Going Ahead With The Best Of Things.

Construed As Turf, Home Just Seems A Provisional Claim, A Designation You Make Upon A Place, Not One It Makes On You. A Certain Set Of Buildings, A Glimpsed, Smudged Window-view Across A Schoolyard, A Musty Aroma Sniffed Behind A Garage When You Were A Child, All Of Which Come Crowding In Upon Your Latter-day Senses -- Those Are Pungent Things And Vivid, Even Consoling. But To Me They Are Also Inert And Nostalgic And Unlikely To Connect You To The Real, To That Essence Art Can Sometimes Achieve, Which Is Permanence.

Marrying The Right Girl Is Even More Imperative Today Than It Was When I Was 23 Years Old Because It's So Much Harder To Get On As An Imaginative Writer Like Me Now. You Need To Have Somebody Who Believes In What You're Doing And Who Never Is Skeptical About What You're Doing. My Wife Thought It Was A Great Thing For Me To Be A Writer Because In Practical Terms It Freed Her To Do What She Wanted To Do, Which Was Work.

I Think Once You Love Somebody, You Love Somebody; That's Just How It Is.