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.

What is the pattern of change?

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.

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.

In Literature, only trouble is interesting.

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.

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