Another idea about fiction. Why be afraid of the first person? The very situation forces out philosophical issues and also (as I was told) frees you from a dependence (or requirement) on physical description. Well, naturally. If you are more *worried about* issues of internal consistency you are not going to pay so much attention to the details.The *delicious* details of which the actual present consists. The other idea is presenting before the reader a "case." I think this is the most interesting kind of book. The author must also convince themselves this way- the ambivalence is about choosing among several possible ways of understanding things and people.

There is every possibility that I have unconsciously been held back from writing as completely as I am able about others on account of certain kinds of anxieties. The point is not so much to catalogue these anxieties but to circumvent them. Reading "Howard's End" has effected me in many ways, but one of these ways is to review thoughts about these issues.

Words reveal us at the same moment we reveal them. It is as much the need to try to control what they reveal as it is to use them to reveal.

Words reveal us at the same moment we use them to reveal anything. This is primarily what is so absorbing about them and why we turn to them or wish to at nearly every significant moment of our experience. Both literature and psychoanalysis consists of the things we say to ourselves, and to each other. But these things we say we always say in words and these words often have somethiing to say of their own back to us. This is how language itself comes to be part of our lives in the same way that beliefs and wishes and memories become part of our lives. As I came to realize this with more and more conviction, my desire to express this conviction to others became more a part of my desire to write.