Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
people read books. America is an ill-educated country.
It’s sad what it takes to get on the best-seller list; for
a hard-cover non-fiction book published in the Spring,
which is the weaker period, selling as few as 30,000
copies will get you on the list. Isn’t that shocking for
a product that costs $20-$25 in a nation of 250 million
people. More usually it’s 50,000 or 100,000, but still,
it’s so few. I can’t begin to tell you if it has any effect.”
After 25 years of writing, and nearly a half-century
on the planet, do you have any words of advice for
young people? “No, I can’t figure out where I went
right. I love to count it up to my fabulous skill and my
BUY P.J. O’Rourke books online from and
insights and stuff like that, but I think it’s just because
I stuck to it. There’s a Woody Allen line about how it’s
remarkable how much of life has to do with just showing
up. And I think about all the people I was working
with 25 years ago, many of them much more talented
than I was. Well, I remembered not to die from drug
overdose. ‘To do: Don’t die from drug abuse’. Mostly I
just stuck to it, and a lot of them didn’t. I just kept plugging
away, probably out of inertia more than anything
else. And I think if you do keep doing something for a
while, you do learn how to do it. You learn how to work
around areas of huge inability.” �
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