Draft No. 4

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.

his father had been a factory worker but was replaced by a small gadget.

I had reason not to be optimistic.

The creative writer leaves white space between chapters or segments of chapters. The creative reader silently articulates the unwritten thought that is present in the white space. Let the reader have the experience. Leave judgment in the eye of the beholder. When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author. If you see yourself prancin

Chauffeurs are good for about six months, he said. For two months, they are learning to work for you. Then for two months they are excellent. Then they start to steal from you, and two months later you fire them.

I stopped there as routinely as an animal at a salt lick.

A lead is good not because it dances, fires cannons, or whistles like a train but because it is absolute to what follows.

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

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.