I think most of my life I have not felt recognized.
I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.
Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts.
With certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life.
My first encounter with James was when I was seventeen. My brother brought home from the public library a science fiction anthology, which included 'The Beast in the Jungle.' It swept me away. I had a strange, somewhat uncanny feeling that it was the story of my life.
In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: it's the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.