No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?

Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid?

The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.

Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood's learning is made up of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse.

Location pertains to feelings - feelings are bound up in place.

I'm a great reader that never has time to read.