and did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did.

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldnt turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.

It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.

Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.

I guess my writing has changed as my life has.