a swell of gratitude and appreciation for his assistant, as opposed to the murderous rage he felt toward the rest of his staff

And the question is, which one is really "you.

I write my first draft by hand, at least for fiction. For non-fiction, I write happily on a computer, but for fiction I write by hand, because I'm trying to achieve a kind of thoughtless state, or an unconscious instinctive state. I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.

Redemption, transformation--God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?

This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.

I've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, I'm going to ace this. It's just not who I am.

reach isn’t describable in terms of cause and effect anymore: it’s simultaneous.