Wisdom from Mt. Ragged Glory, courtesy of an interview in Entertainment Weekly:
Did you enjoy writing in the first-person voice of the devil? It seems like you did.
You want to have fun with your narrator. You know, writers are like actors. Warren Beatty has a remark I love. I saw him in Bugsy, and afterward I was kidding him a little. I said, ''Aren't you concerned your friends might be afraid of you now?'' because he had a violence in Bugsy that was really startling. And he said, ''No, because most of my friends are actors, and what we know is that you only need 5 percent of someone in yourself to be able to play it.'' And Beatty grinned and said, ''Of course, if you have 75 percent it's a lot easier. But 5's all you need.'' And I thought, that's all you need in novel writing. Five percent is enough to create a character. So all right, if you will: 5 percent of me is the devil.
Is this the worst time to be alive?
No, no, it's not. There's one good thing about old age that people don't recognize. Which is that if you have a reasonable old age, as I do, in that you're not in pain, and you're not in terrible trouble emotionally with your children, or your mate, then what happens is you cool. And you finally are cool in a way that you never were before. And you realize that you won and you lost, and that's just what happens to everyone else. They win and they lose also. And what you didn't succeed in doing, you didn't succeed in doing, so fuck it.
The Castle in the Forest, out manana!
