You Cannot Combine Being A Movie Star

He Didn't Want To Please His Readers. He Wanted To Stretch Them Until They Twanged.

I Am Easily Moved To Tears And Rarely Survive A Visit To The Cinema Without Shedding Them, Racked, As I Am, By The Most Perfunctory, Meretricious Or Even Callously Sentimental Attempts At Poignancy (something About The Exterior Of The Human Face, So Vast And Palpable, With The Eyes And The Lips: It Is All Writ Too Large For Me, Too Immediate For Me.)

People? People Are Chaotic Quiddities Living In One Cave Each. They Pass The Hours In Amorous Grudge And Playback And Thought Experiment. At The Campfire They Put The Usual Fraction On Exhibit, And Listen To Their Own Silent Gibber About How They're Feeling And How They're Going Down. We've Been There. Death Helps. Death Gives Us Something To Do. Because It's A Fulltime Job Looking The Other Way.

I Think Jorge Borges Said That When Argentineans Die They Turn Into Angels And Go And Live In Uruguay. But For The Rest Of South America, You Have To Say That It's Getting There - Becoming Civilized - And Will Get There. It's Had A Real Grit War In History. The Choice Between Those Societies Until Recently Was The Choice Between Tyranny And Chaos. Everyone Understood That. You've Got To Have A Strong Man, Or It's Going To Be A Mess.

Saul Bellow Says, Funny Enough, What French Think Of Your Work Is Tremendously Important. And It Is. It's More Than What The Italians, The Spanish, And The Germans Think. Somehow It's Still Got That Cultural Primacy. I Feel That Too: To Get Praised In France Is Better Than To Get Praised Anywhere Else.