One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.
If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work
Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read – they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.
Nobody does anything for one reason.
A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
Motivations are too tangled and complex.
What I am finding now is that my audience is getting younger as I get older, which is a very good thing as you know – you don’t want them to get older as you get older.
So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing us.
Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.
Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It’s one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for.
The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.
