Ambitions

I want to do everything as a writer.

I want to fuse high art and high entertainment so indivisibly that only academic morons can figure out a way to separate them into their component parts, or be bothered to.

I want to make people laugh with genuine openhearted glee and I want to make them laugh a lot when they don't feel a lot like laughing. I've no aversion to making them cry, and I certainly want to make them aware how much our structures of economy and culture are fed by an underground river of shed blood and tears. If tears are a necessary fuel of life, I want to make them tears of laughter.

I want to make people think, improbable as that may seem if they've spent twelve to twenty years in school learning not to.

I want to change the history of the world, which can't be that much more difficult than making people think.

I want to fuse logic and intuition, science and art--what the Hell were we thinking when we separated them anyway?

I want to inflame the mind, heart and conscience of my readers 'til they're so many torches lighting the way in the darkness.

At Judgment Day if there is such a thing apart from each fresh day that peeps up with the dawn, I won't be asked why I wasn't Moses, Hillel or Rabbi Zusa; Blake, Swift, Dostoyevsky or Bosch; William the Silent or Tecumseh; Hakuin or even Matt "the Magnificent" Grunewald. I'll be asked why I wasn't Martin, and I want to be able to answer "I was, as far as circumstances permitted," and prove it with examples.

I want to do what I can do, I don't want to do what could be done just as well if I weren't here.