Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn't come here. Well, it can't hide forever - one day we will overhear it.

Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future.

Whenever you don't know someone and you overhear their problems they always sound so trivial.

Now and then, teaching may approach poetry, and now and then it?may approach profanity. May I tell you a little story about the great?Einstein? I listened once to Einstein as he talked to a group of?physicists in a party. "Why have all the electrons the same charge?" said he. "Well, why are all the little balls in the goat dung of the same size?"?Why did Einstein say such things? Just to make some snobs to raise?their eyebrows? He was not disinclined to do so, I think. Yet,?probably, it went deeper. I do not think that the overheard remark of?Einstein was quite casual. At any rate, I learnt something from it:?Abstractions are important; use all means to make them more tangible.?Nothing is too good or too bad, too poetical or too trivial to clarify your?abstractions. As Montaigne put it: The truth is such a great thing that?we should not disdain any means that could lead to it. Therefore, if the spirit moves you to be a little poetical, or a little profane, in your class,?do not have the wrong kind of inhibition." - George Polya's Mathematical Discovery, Volume 11, pp 102, 1962.

So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven?

But yeah I'm really happy when I'm writing. When I'm being creative and when I have something that I can put down. You know if you go out and you overhear a conversation or you have a thought you have a receptacle to go home and say 'Oh this would be great in this script.' Your antenna's out in a different way and I love that time.

I usually write away from home in coffee shops on trains on planes in friends' houses. I like places where there's stuff going on that you can lift your eyes see something interesting overhear a conversation.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.