After Half a Century, Still Writing, Still Questing

He is a courtly old gent, limping precariously on a bad knee across his top-floor apartment in Brooklyn Heights, a flat gray light sweeping in from the harbor. ”Oh, I have been using too many big words,” he says, a little sheepishly, a shy smile breaking across his furrowed face.

”I really don’t rely on talismans as a writer,” he says. ”But I do have this growing sense as the years go along that the one thing you should never do is take yourself too seriously. Because you are not in this alone.”