It is our old love I love. - Erica Jong

The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.

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.

They all cheat sooner or later. You might as well have one who isn't a bore the rest of the time.