History is the vast store of human consciousness adrift in the gulf of time, the present living in the past and the past living in the present. So when I read Shakespeare, Jefferson, Twain, or Machiavelli, I’m with them in time present. It’s why we still read Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and Flaubert—what survives the wreck of time... See more

It becomes a pleasure after about the fifth, possibly the sixth draft. At that point it begins to be fun because you begin to have an inkling of what you’re trying to say. You never know what you think until you try to set it up in a sentence, maybe fish it into the net of a metaphor. The writing doesn’t get easier, but the work becomes play.