It's extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can't get a job on a ship unless you have seaman's paper's, and you can't get seaman's papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me. |
It's no accident that he should've felt that way because I very consciously was writing a book about the 20th century. In fact, all during the writing of the book I had a subtitle in mind, not that I was going to use it but it was kind of a working tool, which was "Anna Bloom Walks Through The 20th Century." |
The book is your book. You have been responsible for every single thing on every page, every comma, every syllable is your work. |
The funny thing is, as a young person I was trying to write prose, and I wrote a lot of it, but I was never satisfied with the results. Two of the novels I wound up finishing and publishing later I started very early on, in my early 20's, In The Country Of Last Things and Moon Palace. Both of those books I worked a great deal on but never quite got a grip on either one. |
There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round. |
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread. |
You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky. |
You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either. |
You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one. |