Detachment must be cultivated against the longing to be perfectly open and receptive. It all comes back to poise, the poise of the soul when it is in true balance. The human mistakes I make often come from rushing in fast in order to be "done" with something, to have answered, to get it off the desk and this forced response may go too far, give

. . . this solitude into which we have just come, and which gives us such a strong sense of inner responsibility, and at the same time of the impossibility of being self-sufficient, is experienced as a solitude only because it is at the same time an appeal toward solitudes like our own with whom we feel the need to be in communion; for it is only

My own belief is that one regards oneself, if one is a serious writer, as an instrument for experiencing. Life—all of it—flows through this instrument and is distilled through it into works of art. How one lives as a private person is intimately bound into the work. And at some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating

I should not feel so pressed for time, but I do, and I suppose I always shall. Yeats speaks of spending a week on one stanza. The danger, of course, is overmanipulation, when one finds oneself manipulating words, not images or concepts.

So, at the end of my think, it was not the word "grandeur" or "greatness" that stayed with me, but "wholeness." It occurs to me that this is often a masculine attribute (my father had it, not my mother) and that perhaps it goes not only with dedication to noble ends, but with a certain simple-mindedness-the people who hew to the heart of the

All aspiring writers say these things: "I will not compromise and write a best seller!"-as if they could! There may be a few totally faked-up books that sell, but on the whole I believe every writer writes as well as he can. It takes a good storyteller to write a best seller, and a good craftsman. The professional will never brush the best seller