Are all your stars shining?

Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles.

Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.

If there is an amateur reader still left in the world - or anybody who just reads and runs - I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.

There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work.

There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady.

Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day.