I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.
I was an economics major in college and every summer after school I would drive my car from California from Claremont men's college at the time to New York. And I worked on Wall Street.