[Q] So by now, at some point, you'd… you, had you changed your mind about being a writer?

No, I don't think I had changed my mind, but I… I was interested in publishing, I had enough ego to want to be validated in what I thought was interesting reading.  One of the first books we published at the Orion Press in the period I was there was Primo Levi's If This Is a Man.  I don't think there's anybody in the world except you, now on tape or video tape or whatever it is, who knows that Primo Levi was first started by the Orion Press. 

There are other books, not so famous, that we published there.  So I started to get interested, and I thought well, you can make a living at this, and I will write on the side. But finally, publishing became a larger and larger part of my life as I, I suppose the phrase is, advanced, got better jobs, and it took up more and more of my time. I found myself getting some satisfaction publishing an author, somebody else, and making his voice well known, rather than my own, or my own in respect of having chosen this book, and published it correctly. 

So there was a shift in my ego, and I found I could satisfy my ego needs as a publisher.  Maybe not as well as it might have been had I continued writing.