The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He
wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky
than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His
only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that I am sure is why he does it.
Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely
drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.
I began to realize how simple life could be if one
had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do.
The writer has to force himself to work. He has to
make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him.
A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.
We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it.
Matilda said, "Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with
it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable...”
I understand what you're saying, and your comments are valuable,
but I'm gonna ignore your advice.
You should never, never doubt something that no one is sure
of.
watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same.
It's sure to be a phony.
Life is more fun if you play games.
I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He
taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both
arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and
passionate is the only thing to be
"There are many other little refinements too, Mr. Bohlen. You'll see them
all when you study the plans carefully. For example, there's a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at
least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So
I have the machine do the same thing. There'll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose."
"Where?"
"In the 'word-memory' section," he said, epexegetically.
Having power is not nearly as important as what you choose to do with it.
and when he put his mind to it, he could make his words coil themselves
around and around the listener until they held her in some sort of a mild hypnotic spell.
It was always a great surprise to me that I was good at games. One of these
was called fives, and the other was squash-racquets.
On the way to school and on the way back we always passed the sweet-shop.
We always stopped. We lingered outside its small window gazing in at the big glass jars.
The sweet-shop in Llandaff in the year 1923 was the very centre of our lives.
To us, it was what a bar is to a drunk. Without it, there would have been little to live for.
