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.

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.

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.

If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background, and as in a painting's composition, the foreground may be in harmony or in conflict with the background.

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.

The mystique and the false glamour of the writing profession grow partly out of a mistaken belief that people who can express profound ideas and emotions have ideas and emotions more profound than the rest of us. It isn't so. The ability to express is a special gift with a special craft to support it and is spread fairly equally among the profound, the shallow, and the mediocre.

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.