I'm just trying to lead my own fucking life if I can manage to find it in all this confusion. - Erica Jong

I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.

I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world...

...if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.