After the Field Service, when I was back at Harvard, I was still writing poetry, and I met the poet Theodore Spencer.
As he was telling us about these pleasures, at that very moment, in the ruin and the tall grass, I stepped on a hornets, nest and got stung.
As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari.
Because of my father's dislocated life, I knew intuitively that I wanted to have as few jobs as possible by the time I was married.
He was the first person to befriend me at Harvard. At any rate, in some class the teacher gave us an exercise which I've used ever since.
I decided I would do that aver again - make an entire novel out of that one little passage.
I didn't for a moment doubt the choice, but if life is ever fearsome, it is truly fearsome then.
I didn't know what kind of jobs, because how was I prepared? At best, I would be an AB in English.
I do not feel an exile from America in any sense.
I don't know much about my mother's family. Her father was in the banking business.
I had to go to Sunday school once or twice in my life, and that's where I commented someplace on hearing.
I remember my mother finding mud somehow and putting it on the sting.
I remembered a paragraph from The Cannibal, when the women from the village go to the institution to put down the rebellion.
I think he was waiting and hoping for some moment when I might be able to get a job at Harvard, and that's what happened.
I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.
I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.
I wanted to make up worlds, and I wanted to be distant enough to control these worlds authoritatively, superbly.
I was becoming involved in those materials in such a way as to cause the language to break down, to become clotted.
I was not typical. Whatever typical or normal is, I was somehow separated and different.
I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.
In Ford's book, that state which we consider normal and conventional in our lives is denied the fictional characters.
In my earliest childhood, we seemed to move back and forth between New York City and Connecticut until I was about eight or ten years old.
In The Lime Twig I took two very young people and made them very old.
It had a bear on the front of it; when I think of it I remember this Indian, who was a kind of Huckleberry Finn figure.
It had dimly been in my mind that I would like to teach, but I simply gave up the hope because it seemed utterly impossible.
It's hard to tell whether the ship or airplane - they're all the same, I'm convinced - is male or female; it may shift back and forth.
My education was constantly interrupted. I moved around a great deal, had no real sense of home, except for the New England landscape.
My father's parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead.
My mother wanted very much to play tennis; she wanted, most of all, to be a singer and play the piano.
On the night before we were married, all of the anxiety in the world came down upon me.
Once I started to write prose, I certainly did not envy the poets. I've mocked poets and poetry ever since I began writing fiction.
Really, I didn't like Alaska. It rained, almost every day, at least 300 days out of the year.
Still, it's interesting that I can't account for how Charivari came into existence.
That schizophrenic act was probably my first real fictive effort, written in 1943.
The earliest memory in Connecticut that I can think of has to do with a riding stable that abutted against the property of my grandfather.
The Indians there lived in terrible poverty, in shacks right on the waterfront of the city. I was always aware of them.
The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.
The world of this banal figure is suddenly, totally disrupted and violated when the imprisoned women revolt and take it over.
Then he read us a passage, and I recognized my own words coming from his mouth; it was quite a wonderful experience.
Then I went into the American Field Service, and that really is quite a long story.
These things she gave up because, in the early '30s, after the Depression, my father went to Alaska in order to speculate.
To be anywhere near an enormous ocean liner when you are just like a fish in the water is frightening.
When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.
When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship.
Before he discovered acting, John had a passion for wrestling.
Before landing the memorable role of Phillip Padgett in The X Files episode "Milagro", he auditioned for the lead villains in the episodes "Squeeze" and "Trevor".
When he first moved to Austin, John worked as a waiter and a carpenter as well as acting.
John cites Robert Duvall as the actor he most admires.
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