All you who sleep tonight Far from the ones you love, No hand to left or right, An emptiness above– Know that you aren’t alone. The whole world shares your tears, Some for two nights or one, And some for all your years.
Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people’s lives, the lives of people you don’t know, and you want to know what’s going to happen to them.
And the process of reading is such a private one. I once came into a room where a friend of mine was reading one of my books, and he clicked his tongue impatiently and shooed me off.
Those books of mine that are remunerative – I’m not talking about poetry here – take years to write, and I am never sure they’ll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one.
In a painting, you can’t make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist’s stroke.
I certainly think its very important that writers as citizens – not necessarily as writers, but just as ordinary citizens – should talk about things that matter to them.
Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music-not too much, or the soul could not sustain it-from time to time.
