"It's preoccupied me my whole life, long before Gary was executed, and it has occupied my creative energies for a great many years," he continues.
I feel guilty that I hate my body to the extent that, in my mind, it detracts from anything else I might achieve, meaning that I have turned down television appearances for fear of looking fat, and that it has preoccupied me far more than my own career in terms of energy.
I thought a great deal about that, and it actually preoccupied me a lot.
Anyone could tell you that a photograph such as the one of my grandfather trussed in a cloak and white wig, watched by bewildered crows, represented the point at which life becomes a novel and a novel becomes a life, but as I sat down to write my second book, it was New York that preoccupied me.
But it was Grant, not Twain, who preoccupied me during my stay in Galena.
"It's something that has always preoccupied me: how in that context one can lose a sense of oneself.
It's an idea that has preoccupied me ever since I was a medical student and on the stage I'm preoccupied by those negligible details of action – the trivial details of what people are doing when they're saying something are often left out in theatre.
The anxiety preoccupied me to such an extent that I almost didn't do it.
It was about growing up, developing, worrying whether she fit in... all the things that preoccupied me at the time, and none of the things I'd ever seen in an actual book.
Structure has preoccupied me in every project I have undertaken since, and, like Mrs. McKee, I have hammered it at Princeton writing students across four decades of teaching: "You can build a strong, sound, and artful structure.
