Draft No. 4

I had little else to do but show up for cocktails at five in the evening.

an activity that calls for a special style of mind, constantly seeking intelligence and finding it even if it is not there, for in peacetime exercises what is required above all else is imagination.

Now General Eisenhower and I were alone in his studio. What on earth to say—with those five stars in pentimento on his shoulders, me a nineteen-year-old college student. The problem was more his than mine, but for him it was not a problem.

The sex life of citrus is spectacular. Plant a lime seed and up comes a kumquat, or, with equal odds, a Seville orange, not to mention a rough lemon or a tangerine.

Corporations prepare for journalists with bug spray. They are generally less approachable than, say, the F.B.I., and, if at all agreeable, take even more precautions.

When I come out and walk around, bumping into friends, they tend to ask me, “What are you working on?” Which is one reason I don’t often come out and walk around. I

She mailed the marked-up copy to Harold Ross, the founding editor, and Ross was said to have bellowed. What he bellowed was “Find this bitch and hire her!”

Creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have.

You are working on a first draft and small wonder you’re unhappy. If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you