To hell with facts! We need stories.
I've enjoyed being a famous writer-except that every once in a while you have to write something.
Luckily, I remembered something Malcolm Cowley had taught us at Stanford - perhaps the most important lesson a writing class (not a writer, understand, but a class) can ever learn. 'Be gentle with one another's efforts,' he often admonished us. 'Be kind and considerate with your criticism. Always remember that it's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.'
When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.
Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing.
I felt like you can write forever, but you have a short time to raise a family. And I think a family is a lot more important than writing.
But the more I read... after awhile... I begin to find they were all writing about the same thing, this same dull old here-today-gone-tomorrow scene... Shakespeare, Milton, Matthew Arnold, even Baudelaire, even this cat whoever he was that wrote Beowulf... the same scene for the same reasons and to the same end, whether it was Dante with his pit or Baudelaire with his pot... the same dull old scene...
