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.

To gain the book, one must give up all hope for the book. It is the only way the book can get written.

The only way [the book can be written] is to set the unbook-the gilt-framed portrait of the book-right there on the altar and sacrifice it, truly sacrifice it. Only then may the book, the real live flawed finite book, slowly, sentence by carnal sentence, appear.

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?

our finest writing will certainly come from what is unregenerate in ourselves. It will come from the part that is obdurate, unbanishable, immune to education, springing up like grass.

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

Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.