I have a friend…I wouldn’t call him a friend… I dare say if I met him, I would be a very dear friend of his because he’s a friend of so many I love. He spoke of William Butler Yeats and he spoke of A.E., George Russell, and he spoke of all these great Irish poets that were always so fiery. So, in this, he’s telling the story of the critics of the day and how insane they really are—he’s written many books himself—and no two agree, all have their own little opinion. If you put them all together…he said the most amazing thing is that one man could be so many things, because all of a sudden this one said this of the book, that one said that, and he gets twelve outstanding critics and no two are in agreement on the things that they see that no one else sees. So he said, “William Butler Yeats once said to a friend of mine, he said, ‘Do not for one moment be concerned about what the reader is thinking. I don’t write for the reader.’” He said, “I can’t write for my readers. I am so completely trained to hear what my character is trying to say to me, I haven’t ears for anyone else but my character. I am writing about a character and the character has to tell me what to say. Let the reader now be frightfully surprised what both are going to tell him, both the character and myself. Because, I can only write what the character is telling me to say. So I strain to hear what the character is saying.” Now, he said, “Shakespeare did this. Do you think for one second Shakespeare tried to educate people? No, he was being educated by his own characters.” That’s true. You can hear them. So, you listen to some friend’s voice, all in your Imagination, and strain to hear what he’s saying. Do you know you can’t always dictate what you want to hear? He is speaking. If you’re honest, you’ll hear it and you’ll put it down. That’s what he’s really saying…all tuning, tuning the character. And then, if you do it this way and forget the so-called reading public, what does it matter? You’re tuning in characters.354 ¶23