Friends Cannot Be Objects "I suppose if I were a novelist rather than a Chautauqua orator I'd try to 'develop' the characters of John and Sylvia and Chris with action-packed scenes that would also reveal 'inner meanings' of Zen and maybe Art and maybe even Motorcycle Maintenance. That would be quite a novel, but for some reason I don't feel quite up to it. They're friends, not characters, and as Sylvia herself once said, 'I don't like being an object!' So a lot of things we know about one another I'm simply not going into. Nothing bad, but not really relevant to the Chautauqua. That's the way it should be with friends.' Page 121 The state