"Asimov, Isaac - The Early Asimov - Volume 01" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)

(bless them!). I am constantly getting letters requesting lists
of ancient stories out of me so that the letter writers can haunt
secondhand shops for old magazines. There are people who
prepare bibliographies of my science fiction (don't ask me
why) and who want to know all sorts of half-forgotten details
concerning them. They even grow distinctly angry when they
find that some early stories were never sold and no longer
exist. They want those, too, apparently, and seem to think I
have negligently destroyed a natural resource.

So when Panther Books, in England, and Doubleday sug-
gested that I make a collection of those of my early stories
not already collected in the ten books listed above, with the
literary history'of each, I could resist no further. Everyone
who has ever met me knows just how amenable to flattery I
am, and if you think I can withstand this kind of flattery for
more than half a second (as a rough estimate), you are quite
wrong.

Fortunately I have a diary, which I have been keeping since
January 1, 1938 (the day before my eighteenth birthday); it
can give me dates and details.*

I began to write when I was very youngЧeleven, I think.
The reasons are obscure, I might say it was the result of an
unreasoning urge, but that would just indicate I could think
of no reason.

Perhaps it was because I was an avid reader in a family
that was too poor to afford books, even the cheapest, and
besides, a family that considered cheap books unfit reading. I
had to go to the library (my first library card was obtained
for me by my father when I was six years old) and make do
with two books per week.

This was simply not enough, and my craving drove me to
extremes. The diary began as the sort of thing a teen-ager would write,
but it quickly degenerated to a simple kind of literary record. It
is, to anyone but myself, utterly boringЧso boring, in fact, that
1 leave it around for anyone who wishes, to read. No one ever
reads more than two pages. Occasionally someone asks me if I
have never felt that my diary ought to record my innermost
feelings and emotions, and my answer is always, "No. Never!"
After all, what's the point of being a writer if I have to waste my
innermost feelings and emotions on a mere diary?

At the beginning of each school term, I eagerly read
through every schoolbook I was assigned, going from cover
to cover like a personified conflagration. Since I was blessed
with a tenacious memory and with instant recall, that was all