Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

a. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.

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.

I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.

All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.

What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.