Since most interviewers do not
ask very interesting questions,
I wonder what will happen if I ask my own questions.
ABOUT MYSELF:
Do you have any children?
No. I long ago decided that I did not want any
children.
I regard my books as my children.
And one great advantage in having this kind of children
is that I can keep improving them if they come to be appreciated.
The appreciation of these children has been varied.
The most valued have appeared in several editions.
But the least valued have never gone beyond the first edition.
How old are you?
I do not make any secret of my age.
Those who want to seek out this detail can find it in various ways.
I merely say that I am much closer to the date of my death
than to the date of my birth.
The age a person is at any given time
does not seem as interesting or meaningful
as what he or she has to say.
Would anyone care about how old Søren Kierkegaard is?
He was born in 1813. So you can do the math.
But that tells us nothing important about his thought.
It might be interesting to compare a thinker
with others who were alive at the same time.
But most original thinkers do not fit well
into any given culture or sub-culture.
So what others were doing at the same times
does not matter very much.
ABOUT MY BOOKS
Why do you write?
As difficult as it might be to believe,
I write as a service to readers.
The readers alone decide which books go into
additional editions.
Most of my books have had only one edition.
This means that they did not find any great audience.
And when the first edition is sold out,
there will be no more copies of that title.
On the other hand, three of my books have found
readers.
My book on love is now in its sixth edition.
My book on Authenticity is now in its fifth edition.
And my book on our Existential Predicament is now in its fifth edition.
These might be the final editions of these three
books.
But if I continue to get useful feedback from readers,
I will continue to make changes
as long as I can find meaningful ways to improve these books.
Of course, I will also continue to produce new books.
And the readers will decide which of these deserve new editions.
As I said at the beginning the purpose of my
writings is to benefit the readers.
And the major benefit they will discover is a change in their minds.
The readers will have new ways of thinking and living
after they read my words.
And the fact that I have made a few small changes in style
will probably have little effect on the impact of reading my books.
How do you write?
I have no set way of going about creating new ideas.
Each book has emerged in a different way.
And the process of revision usually takes several years.
When I have used a book as a text for a class,
this gives me more feedback from readers,
thereby enabling me to correct parts that can easily be misunderstood.
My shorter pieces for the Internet were usually
composed in one or two sittings.
I have done a better job of keeping track of when each of these pieces
was first created and then when it was revised.
You can see an example of such dates at the end of this piece.
Once I got a computer in the middle 1990s,
I have found it much easier to compose on a computer screen.
Before that, I wrote all of my books on my IBM executive typewriter,
which was also used for producing the first editions of most of my
books.
Having the text in a computer file has made it much
easier to revise.
I do not have to re-type pages over and over again
to make whatever changes I have decided upon.
Some of my books were first composed on paper,
one idea to each sheet of scrap paper.
Then I arranged the sheets into a meaningful order.
For example, this is the way I put together the
Romantic Love Test.
I just kept getting new ideas for questions.
Each of the 180 questions was put on a separate sheet of scrap paper.
Then I organized these questions into the 26 features of romantic love.
Sometimes I have been inspired to write an account
of how each book emerged.
For example, my first book on sex emerged from my attempt
to revise the chapter on sex for my book on love.