Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely.

I spent the morning smashing fliesI killed one fly against the doorjamb. Another I stalked into the kitchen...A third fly wavered by the kitchen window. When I swatted, a wild ferocious swing, a whole trembling crowd shot from the window like pebbles from a blunderbuss, then settled back. My heart pounded. I felt flushed with disgust and irritation. Why must I always have such obstacles to my writing?

Writing teaches writing. Your writing will teach you how to write if you work hard enough and have enough faith.

We are constantly telling ourselves what we most want to know, and at the same time are deaf to it. Why does envy have such a fierce bite? Why do we fall silent or get worried just as our story is about to spring out of our control and into its own life? Whose shadow falls across the page?

Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing.

The antidote to envy is one's own work. Always one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it. The answers you want can come only from the work itself.

Envy is one of the scorpions of the mind, often having little to do with the objective, external world.