No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.

That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example 'where they were' when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored.

My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I’ve decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there. . . . Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.

This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.