I am a writer. I've been a writer since the moment I first took flight in my mother's womb and I will be a writer for as long as my hair, fingernails, and toenails continue to unfurl in my grave, and not a moment longer.

Ten years ago this morning I woke up and found a monumental building inside my imagination. I spent the next nine months doing everything in my power to get that building out of my head and as deep into the world as I could. Though I know it will never be built, I continue to believe that the world would be a better place if it were -- though at ( Read more... )

Last night I dreamt in photographs. One of them was of the wide tall picture window in the living room, looking out over the Hudson River: just inside, under the window's upper frame, facing one another in mid-air, wings ablur, silhouetted against bright day beyond, two hummingbirds hovered, poised as if about to drink nectar each from the other's ( Read more... )

On July 20, 1969 I was in my childhood home in Bellevue Washington, a block above Lake Sammamish. In TV Guide that week, all the columns for all the TV stations were blank for several days running, because every channel was showing the same thing: 24-hour-a-day coverage of Apollo 11. I was 9; I remember, halfway through the moon walk, going outside ( Read more... )

"This temporal, intergenerational logic may be understood structurally. The Winter's Tale perhaps represents the paradigmatic case. Although in Shakespeare's career comedy precedes tragedy, in this play it is the other way around. The first three acts revive Othello, the fourth As You Like It. A generation passes between these two movements of ( Read more... )

When I first awoke, what I remembered was movie footage of an airplane coming in for a crash landing: the pilot gripping the wheel, then the toy-like old-style white passenger jet passing over the upper branches of a forest, banking, heading out over water, a lake with a very futuristic mall-like building filling an entire island in the middle, and ( Read more... )

Working on finalizing Little, Big on Summer Solstice Eve, I had occasion to double-check a textual reference in "Pictured Heavens", the final scene of 3.1, which took me back to the original typescript of the novel, the version first submitted to Bantam Books in 1979 or '80. A handwritten emendation elsewhere on the page I consulted caught my eye, ( Read more... )

Today I sold a revised version of my 8,000-word essay, "The First Woman on Mars," to White Fungus, a beautifully-produced English-language Art Journal published in Taiwan. Because of the strong visual-arts orientation of the journal, my essay is likely to be accompanied by several original works of art, photographic and otherwise; I'll be working ( Read more... )

In the mid-1970s I read an essay about humanity's future and the future of life in the universe written by the eminent physicist Freeman J. Dyson. It was called "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil", and it was among the most astonishing reading experiences of my life. One section of the essay in particular, "Big Trees", completely blew me away. In ( Read more... )

Dear Mr. President ( Read more... )