The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.

Pay attention to your passions. They are the key to starting and finishing the book you are meant to write. I don't believe in talent. I believe in passion.

I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

Back then I was still appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting fo the dollies.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.