every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Silences can be as different as sounds.

every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

Plot is the knowing of destination.

The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant