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The amazing thing is, you can get through. Literature is very theft-based, and it’s not a bad thing. If you’re Jackson Pollock, you go study Picasso to learn his technique, and if you’re Picasso, you study those archaic cave paintings. When I fell in love with Joan Didion’s work, I tried to read all of her heroes. As you trace back this way, you start to see how much is repeated. The same ideas, the same technical flourishes, the same cadences. Certain things flow down from author to author, book to book, just percolating over time. It’s through that gradual motion that literature enlarges us. Each borrowed gesture—whether it’s an intentional homage or just something a writer adored and internalized‚ is a sign someone or something broke through. A sign that a new way of thinking, one you could never have come up with on your own, occurred to you vividly through something you read. That’s what it means to be a writer, to me: to be a vehicle for a way of thinking, even a single thought, that’s been winding its way through the ages, that I have the good fortune to inherit and pass along.— Joe Fassler
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