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.

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.

The human desire to know why is as powerful as the desire to know what happened next, and it is a desire of a higher order.

In Literature, only trouble is interesting.

I sit and pass judgment on myself: this is dull, this is unclear, this is insignificant: ergo I am dull, I am unclear, I am insignificant.

What is the pattern of change?

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