i wish i was away in Ingo far across the briny sea sailing over deepest waters where neither care nore worry trouble me

A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.

If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.