“Should this strike you as rather presumptuous on my part, you’re probably not just whistling Sinatra. On the other hand, the halls of publishing houses were not sufficiently insulated from the ongoing amphetamine pace of Manhattan, and while the prevailing physical and psychological hubbub, the busyness of it all, might actually be a fitting accompaniment to the contemplation of fast-paced thrillers, or for that matter, tomes a-twitch with Jewish, Irish, or Episcopalian angst, a meaningful assessment of my sentences, quirky in ways different from Eastern Seaboard quirkiness, required of an editor, if not exactly a West Coast sensibility, at least a mind relaxed enough to follow the charmer’s pipes out of the familiar, well-paved neighborhoods of syntax and story line and into a kind of wild, neo-druidic grove, emblazoned with poppies, woodpeckers, spotted toadstools, and a painted pagoda where the Language Wheel is banged like a gong and no Ivy League creative-writing professor would ever have been caught smiling let alone dead.”
