Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.

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.

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.

I believe in guilt. There's not enough guilt around these days for my taste.

You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.

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.

Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader's face.