Popular success is a wonderful gift if it happens, but like money, it's not the motivation. The effort to create a work of art that is true and potentially lasting, that is the very best work of art you can create at that point in your life - a book that may only reach or move a few people but will seem to people somehow transformative. That's the ideal; that's always the motivation.

The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.

But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.

It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they're lying to you, but as often because they're lying to themselves.

Does Being Happy simply Create More Time, in the way that Being Sad, as we all know, slows time and thickens it, like cornstarch in a sauce?).

I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another - desire, by another name - is the source of almost every sorrow.

I always say to my students, if you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.