I keep two notebooks. One for the book, and one against it. The second is a list of sentences that owe me money — lines I wrote at midnight that seemed, at the time, to be paying their way. In the morning most of them file for bankruptcy.

A ledger of sentences is not a diary and it is certainly not draft material. It is a record of small, deliberate debts. The ones that survive three revisions are allowed into the draft, where they usually do the polite thing and make room for something less showy.