Every rejection is incremental payment on your dues that in some way will be translated back into your work.

You do it a day at a time. You write as well as you can, you put it in the mail, you leave it under submission, you never leave it at home.

Neither our own passing nor the passing of an era is a tragedy, no matter how much we would like to think it is.

If you put somebody on a crack pipe and give them a 9 mm Baretta, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what's going to happen next.

Is there a design in the events of our lives? Or do things just happen, much like a junk yard falling down a staircase? If it's the latter, how do you deal with it?

How do you caution a fawn about a cigarette a motorist has just flipped from his car window into a patch of yellow grass, or tell a sparrow that winged creatures eventually plummet to earth?

The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us.