Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.

We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.

The reason I wouldn't dare to write a Western is simply because that seems to be so much a part of American culture. Maybe if I want to write a Western enough I should try to overcome that fear, but I'll certainly feel like I'm trespassing. I feel that that is so much a part of American foundation myth, it's part of the myth of America, the American vision of what America is, which people have glorified and then challenged and then vilified.

I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?

And what made these heart-to-hearts possible--you might even say what made the whole friendship possible during that time--was this understanding we had that anything we told each other during these moments would be treated with careful respect: that we'd honor confidences, and that no matter how much we rowed, we wouldn't use against each other anything we'd talked about during those sessions.

Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in - particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.