I'm always tripped up by the eternal who am I?

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.

I always feel like I'm struggling to become someone else. Like I'm trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it's part of growing up; it's also an attempt to reinvent myself.

But what seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else.

Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.

It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving. And every time the wind-up bird came to my yard to wind its spring, the world descendedmore deeply into chaos.

Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.