It's true that the young who now flock to script writing, or producing and directing, to fulfill the demands of these new devices would, in an earlier period, have been submitting to magazines and working on their first novels. But even in the midst of all these "digital products," the wonder of it is that there are still so many young writers who continue to believe in the venerable print novel as the corridor to fame and fortune.

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

The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.

Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.

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.

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

Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts.