A youthful American voice isn't particularly challenging - I've been a young American, and they're all around me. I can walk from my house to Barrington High School.

My whole life experience feeds into my writing. I think that must be true for every writer. Clearly the Army and combat were major influences; just the same, you need to understand that many of the writers we have now couldn't load a revolver.

All the history of the stage is a struggle, the gasping of a beautiful child born at the point of death. The moralists, censorship and oppression, technology, and now poverty have all tried to destroy her. Only we, the actors and audiences, have kept her alive.

...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

We choose--or choose not--to be alone when we decide whom we will accept as our fellows, and whom we will reject. Thus an eremite in a mountain is in company, because the birds and coneys, the initiates whose words live in his 'forest books,' and the winds--the messengers of the Increate--are his companions. Another man, living in the midst of millions, may be alone, because there are none but enemies and victims around him.

You must know the story of how the race of ancient days reached the stars, and how they bargained away all the wild half of themselves to do so, so that they no longer cared for the taste of the pale wind, no for love or lust, nor to make new songs nor to sing old ones, nor for any of the other animal things they believed they had brought with them out of the rain forests al the bottom of time--though in fact, so my uncle told me, those things brought them