Photographs... are the most curious indicators of reality. - Erica Jong

...I am sure that when we love we are better than ourselves and when we hate, worse.

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.

Without sex it would be so easy to choose appropriate people to live with. Sex was the joker in an otherwise rational deck.