What matters is not publication or success (success is bad for your prose) but the practice of the imaginative act. Our damaged values depend on it.

What is the pattern of change?

In Literature, only trouble is interesting.

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

In literature only trouble is interesting. It takes trouble to turn the great themes of life into a story: birth, love, sex, work, and death.

Part of the trouble is that I've never properly understood that some disasters accumulate, that they don't all land like a child out of an apple tree.

What matters is not publication or success (success is bad for your prose) but the practice of the imaginative act. Our damaged values depend on it.