“The world of literature has
everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read
like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English
teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I
rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg
and lassoed a steer in “Lonesome Dove” and had nightmares about slavery in
“Beloved” and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred
stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in “A
Prayer for Owen Meany.” I’ve been in ten thousand cities and have introduced
myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all
because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single
thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them
and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious
gift of the English language.” Pat Conroy
“I need an hour alone
before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it
late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It
removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting
other things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day
before, following these evening notes. When I’m really working I don’t like to
go out or have anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour. If I don’t have
the hour, and start the next day with just some bad pages and nowhere to go, I’m
in low spirits. Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book,
is sleep in the same room with it. That’s one reason I go home to Sacramento to
finish things. Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next
to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and
start typing.” Joan Didion
