For Tommy, on that hot and empty afternoon, was in a state of mind in which grown-up people go away and write books about their whole world, and stories about what it is like to be married, and plays about the important problems of modern times. Tommy, being only ten years old, was not able to do harm on this large and handsome scale.
The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life - and one is as good as another.
In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.
I am writing a play which I probably will not finish until the end of November. I am writing it with considerable pleasure, though I sin frightfully against the conventions of the stage. It is a comedy with three female parts, six male, four acts, a landscape (view of the lake), lots of talk on literature, little action and tons of love.
I hear, Western people say, "The world was created for us." If tigers could write books, they would say, man was created for them and that man is a most sinful animal, because he does not allow him (the tiger) to catch him easily. The worm that crawls under your feet today is a God to be.
It's so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I've never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.
My writing is very organic. It's what I am. My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig. So I think of it as something that's very essential to my being.
If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?
But I love to entertain. My vocation is to accrue all these experiences, to write about them, to get them out of my system, to not get sick, and then to share them publicly.