i forgot until *after* posting this that i once smoked a cigarette with martin amis outside a PEN event. nice guy, rolls them by hand.

When Stephen King’s wife radically rerouted his career by pulling the manuscript of Carrie out of the trash, she had to clean the cigarette ash off of it before she could read it.  Later on he said that his pace as a writer slowed down for years when he quit smoking; without the nicotine, his pace was simply slower.
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