Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting-far, far away-what you last met at home.

I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.

The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.

Old saws have no teeth.

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.

What's impossible not to notice, though - it's all around us - is the diminution of American prose: How pedestrian it has become. Pick up any short story and listen to its voice, the tedious easy vernacular that mistakes transcription for realism. This would display an understandable pragmatism if it were a pandering to common-denominator readers; but it is, in fact, a kind of hifalultin literary ideology, the less-is-more Hemingway legacy put through an up-to-the-minute industrial blender.

In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.