A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

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 we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.