“[A]t my age, you care less. You just plain care less. You
get tired of people’s problems, and you take less interest in them. You think,
‘Oh, to hell with them. I’ll go out and tend to the garden.’
“The kinds of problems you can care about in your old age
are different from the kinds of problems you care about when you’re 30. And
they are probably different from the kinds of problems most of your readers
care about. So you tend to move away from all the heat and calamity of living
and get into a kind of serenity that is not very creative.”
—Wallace Stegner (1909-1993), Western novelist,
interviewed at 80 by James R. Hepworth, “The
Art of Fiction, No. 118,” The Paris Review, 1990.
• Editorial Comment: I’m not sure what
this has to do with journalism. But it sounds like good advice to me. Maybe I’m
getting old.
Pretty. Nice. Day. Trinidad Bay, CA
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