Being a writer is a big deal! A writer thinks about all mankind and jumps into an internal fire, the world is an orphan without him; there is no need to philosophize that being a writer means publishing one book after another, while making deliveries for the vegetable market, sitting every day behind a desk in the bank, or playing Euclid before your students in math class is just the opposite. How will you fathom the dialectics that a writer is born to write a masterpiece and cannot fail to fulfill his mission, and I sense the internal fire somewhere here, below my breast bone – don’t you laugh at me! You will ask me if I am writing anything at all, but do not presume that you have got me in a corner, I already have several notebooks full of plots, episodes, dialogues, verbal portraits, conflicts. I am assiduous, it’s true, but you don’t understand these things; and besides what else is there to do in my room of an evening? I am in no hurry – I am not going to die before I finish my masterpiece – but for a while now I have been having these doubts as to which is more important, the masterpiece or the writer? It took me some time, but I have found out – it’s definitely the writer, because, if there is no writer, where will the masterpiece come from. I think you guessed it. I will put off the masterpiece so that the writer can live longer and if I don’t write it at all, I will live forever and mankind won’t be orphaned. Nevermind that I will jump into that internal fire.