Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are the planet's chief source and cause of torment.

The ordinary is the divine.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, dont confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.

History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.