With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.

I don't have a very logical and orderly mind.

With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.

The past is the prism through which we see a great, great, great deal of ourselves; it's a useful prism. It doesn't mean that we're fascinated by the dead or that we're fascinated by things that are settled. It is just one place where we can go to understand ourselves in the present.

What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.

What I know is, you have chance in life--of surviving it--if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find.

In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.