Crushed to earth and rising again is an author's gymnastic. Once he fails to struggle to his feet and grab his pen, he will contemplate a fact he should never permit himself to face: that in all probability books have been written, are being written, will be written, better than anything he has done, is doing, or will do.

we dig our graves with our teeth.

The grand canyon which yawns between the writer's concept of what he wants to capture in words and what comes through is a cruel abyss.

There is no adequate definition for creative writing, any more than it is possible to describe pain or flavor or color.

Isn't success ridiculously easy, once it begins to succeed? ... after the strain and sweat and pushing until the very groins of your being shrieked protest, something like momentum happened. It took your wits and your concentration and your continued willing sweat, of course, to keep it going, but the success of success had ball bearings.

But suppose, asks the student of the professor, we follow all your structural rules for writing, what about that something else that brings the book alive? What is the formula for that? The formula for that is not included in the curriculum.

It would be a fallacy to deduce that the slow writer necessarily comes up with superior work. There seems to be scant relationshipbetween prolificness and quality.