Writers are like eremites or anchorites - natural-born eremites or anchorites - who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place.

But who knows what good might come from the least of us? From the bones of old horses is made the most beautiful Prussian Blue.

Writers end up writing stories-or rather, stories' shadows-and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough

It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole; of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well.

You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.

A side benefit of the new and developing technologies is that soon we won't have to feel guilty about the suffering and denigration of the animals because we will have made them up.

Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.