One of the greatest difficulties in writing, and it’s built into it, is that on the one hand you have to be very sensitive to be a writer. Sensitive in some special way. At the other end, you have to be tough enough to take the criticism and the rejection. Now compared to being an actor it’s much easier to be a writer because actors encounter face-to-face rejection over and over and over in auditions, but a writer can live at certain distance from the rejection. But nonetheless, once you get published it is one thing, maybe just a short story and nobody ever reviews it. Once you write a novel and it gets published — the first novel — you can’t believe how furious you get at reviews. I remember with The Naked and the Dead, which got very, very good reviews, I couldn’t forgive the people who gave it bad reviews. I wanted to find them and argue with them, and if it came to it, punch them out if I could. I just hated reviewers. To this day they’re not my favorite people because I’ve always felt it’s too easy. You know, it’s so easy to be a reviewer and put something down. And, many reviewers have motivations that, to put the nicest word on it, they’re ugly. So, in that sense, one of the things you have to learn is to be able to take a punch without punching back, and that’s very hard for writers, very hard. So you’ve got to be sensitive on the one hand, and you’ve got to be tough enough to take the difficulties of the rejections, and writing classes are excellent for that.