Claude was the only one of the four subjects who refused to read the manuscript before it went to press. He told me, nothing short of our (then sixteen year) friendship rested on how I portrayed him. “I don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks about me.... What I care about is how you perceive me. How you perceive me after fifteen years — that’s what I hold you responsible for.” Still, through the years, I would call Claude up and read him stories that I suspected he wouldn’t want published. To my amazement, he never censored my portrayal of him. In fact, he almost always added a third or fourth subtext or a new twist to the already twisted logic of a story. Claude has gone on to use the book as part of his course on liberating the genius within, a system composed of sense and sleep deprivation, will power, visualization, and counter-intuitive approaches to problem solving.
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