“Writers aren’t taken seriously anymore, and a large part of the blame must go to the writers of my generation, most certainly including myself. We haven’t written the books that should have been written. We’ve spent too much time exploring ourselves. We haven’t done the imaginative work that could have helped define America… We just expand all over the place, and this spread is about as attractive as collapsed and flabby dough on a stainless steel table.
“Over the years, I’ve found one rule… It’s a simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are… asking your unconscious to prepare the material… If you wake up in the morning with a hangover… your unconscious, after a few such failures to appear, will withdraw.
“The 20th century artist who conceivably had the most influence on my work was not a writer but Picasso. He kept changing the nature of his attack on reality. It’s as if he felt there is a reality to be found out there but it’s not a graspable object like a rock. Rather, it is a creature who keeps changing shape.
We tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of life. Narrative is reassuring. There are days when life is so absurd, it’s crippling–nothing makes sense, but stories bring order to the absurdity. Relief is provided by the narrative’s beginning, middle and end.
“Since at my age you begin to forget all too much, I… hardly remember what I had written the day before. It read, therefore, as if someone else had done it… I could now proceed to fix the prose. The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.
