The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.

It is no more expected of most producers to read a book than it is, say, of Ted Williams to dust off home plate.

And furthermore did you know that behind the discovery of America there was a Jewish financier?

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.

For the record, pot, like the Reader's Digest , is not necessarily habit-forming, but both can lead to hard-core addiction : heroin, in one case, abridged bad books, in the other. Either way you look at it, a withdrawal from a meaningful life.

Fiorito has all the right stuff. His splendid memoir about his relationship with his dying father belongs on that small shelf with Philip Roth's Patrimony and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.