The engineering is secondary to the vision.
In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.
I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.
We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
There's a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.