God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.

That what appears to be egoism so often isn't.

You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.

I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.

I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.