How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?

Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.

To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new. Even Matisse painted some of his Fauvist pictures in anxiety. Maybe that helped him to simplify. Character, discipline, negative capability count. Write, complete, revise. If it doesn't work, begin something else.