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Earlier this week, I was on a flight from New York to Dallas. The man sitting next to me looked to be in his seventies or eighties, elegantly dressed in an Italian blazer with a beautiful Ferragamo tie. I asked him about the book he was reading, Saturday by Ian McEwan. He told me he had met McEwan, on a fishing trip in England, and was surprised ( Read more... )

I can't add to what many others have observed: the suffering is horrible, the government response was slow and infuriating, the poor again suffer the worst, and New Orleans will never be the same. We are responding to calls to support the victims of Katrina in several different ways, with money, goods, assistance in resettling, and prayer. But ( Read more... )

After flying for something like 10 hours, we arrived in Zurich one morning last June. We made our way to the zoo, where I found this image painted on the wall of the snack bar area:



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All of us (by which I mean all of us, both normal and not-so-normal) are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world. We don't live with the mechanical precision of a bank account or by measuring all our lines and angles with rulers and protractors.

Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami

Strehlow once compared the study of Aboriginal myths to entering a 'labrynth of countless corridors and passages,' all of which were mysteriously connected in ways of baffling complexity. Reading the Songs [of Central Australia], I got the impression of a man who had entered this secret world by the back door; who had had the vision of a mental ( Read more... )

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I'm not interested in characters when writing books. The characters--the actions I want were decided for them before they existed. For a given situation I need characters who will react the way I want them to react in that situation. So I have to invent characters who will react the way I want them to react ( Read more... )