In your home, your Writing Study is just below us, the floor below. Just tell me, does it matter to you when you are writing what is going on in the world outside Yourfront Door . Does it affect your writing . Well, it depends on what you mean. If theres a fire engine screeching in front of my door, it will interrupt my concentration, and i might go out and see whats going on. But if theres a distant war going on in another place and i know about it, im not going to read about it while im doing my work for the day. But i certainly will inform myself about it later. You talk of distant wars. Im thinking of wars much closer to home. You write a lot about your take on american politics. Youve talked about your feelings through the course of four years of donald trump. Youve talked about a country at war with itself. So the war isnt so very far away. Yes, the war that were engaged in here, fortunately, has not become yet a fighting war with guns, to a large degree. But we are divided in wa
Us, the floor below. Just tell me, does it matter to you when you are writing what is going on in the world outside Yourfront Door . Does it affect your writing . Well, it depends on what you mean. If theres a fire engine screeching in front of my door, it will interrupt my concentration and i might go out and see whats going on. But if theres a distant war going on in another place and i know about it, im not going to read about it while im doing my work for the day, but i certainly will inform myself about it later. You talk of distant wars, im thinking of wars much closer to home. You write a lot about your take on american politics. Youve talked about your feelings through the course of four years of donald trump. Youve talked about a country at war with itself, so the war isnt so very far away. Yes. The war that were engaged in here, fortunately, has not become, yet, a fighting war with guns to a large degree. But we are divided in ways that i have never seen before, and ive been
so the war isn t so very far away. yes, the war that we re engaged in here, fortunately, has not become, yet, a fighting war with guns, to a large degree. but we are divided in ways that i ve never seen before. and i ve been around a long time now. you ve been around a long time, and you grew up with 60s activism, you were a very vocal opponent of ronald reagan conservatism. you were a very vocal opponent of george bush s decision to go to iraq. true enough. so, are you telling me there is profoundly different about this division in america, this polarisation? cos you could argue we ve been here before many times. well, i think it s been a series of steps that have been taken, and each time when i think it s gotten as bad as it can possibly be, it gets worse. because once obama was elected, and this, i think, is something that people don t talk
for the first time probably in my adult life, and i was reading a lot, and i was reading books that i had somehow missed and had always wanted to read. i finally read middlemarch, for god s sake, my wife s favourite novel. i finally read to the lighthouse by virginia woolf, which i find one of the most beautiful novels i ve ever read in my life, a masterpiece. and one of the writers i went back to was stephen crane, whom i had not read since i was a teenager. and for those folks who don t know him, stephen crane died very young, in his late 20s. 28. ..of tuberculosis, but had already written some extraordinary books that perhaps the most famous of which was a take on fighting in the civil war, the red badge of courage, which he wrote never having been a soldier and certainly born long after the civil war was over.
and i needed a break, and i spent some months not writing at all, anything for the first time probably in my adult life, and i was reading a lot, and i was reading books that i had somehow missed and had always wanted to read. i finally read middlemarch, for god s sake, my wife s favourite novel. i finally read to the lighthouse by virginia woolf, which i find one of the most beautiful novels i ve ever read in my life, a masterpiece. and one of the writers i went back to was stephen crane, whom i had not read since i was a teenager. and for those folks who don t know him, stephen crane died very young, in his late 20s. 28. ..of tuberculosis, but had already written some extraordinary books that perhaps the most famous of which was a take on fighting in the civil war, the red badge of courage, which he wrote, never having been a soldier, and certainly born long after the civil war was over.