I would kind of, you know, go stand next to some unlucky guy and say eventually, Hi, I'm George. You know, I'm with The New Yorker. I'm a liberal. I'm somewhat left of Gandhi. Do you want to talk? And, you know, they always did.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that whatever weirdness was going to be in there, I felt, had to be earned. And it had to be required by the emotional needs of the book.

If I can be more efficient, I'm actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.

It really was something, to see Ram Bahadur Bomjon, apparently living without food or water. Before I went on that trip I'd asked advice on it from a very wise person who I love and revere - basically trying to see if I was somehow disrespecting Buddhism by trying to write about it, and also looking for some grounding on what stance to take ... and my friend said, "Well, why don't you just go and see?" And I hear that in my head all the time now: "Why don't you go and see?"

It seems to me a worthy goal: try to create a representation of consciousness that's durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment.

I've found that my first drafts are not so special. But the more I work on them, the better they get. They are more unique and defensible.

I actually believe that a lot of what people call originality has to do with persistence in the craft.