When I meet successful people I ask 100 questions as to what they attribute their success to. It is usually the same: persistence, hard work and hiring good people.
Then they held my mouth shut for a while and hit me in the face, and with a whip across chest and back. I then collapsed, rolled on the floor, always keeping face down and no longer replied to any of their questions.
In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.
I do not believe that I have had an interview with anybody in twenty-five years in which the person to whom I was talking was not annoyed during the early part of the interview by my asking stupid questions.
Before I was a year old I walked and talked and I was even potty trained. When I started going to school I think I got on everyone's nerves because I used to ask adult questions rather than settle for the stuff usually fed to kids.
At the time, acid made me consider questions of reality, the difference, as someone said, between words and silence. It also brought back a lot of latent religious feelings in me that I had turned my back on.
If anything, if you can get somebody interested in something and get them excited, that's great. You should be praised for having opened the debate and having asked the right questions.
