Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one's generosity? Why regret one's impulsiveness, one's misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you'd written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don't cherish us as we'd cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them.

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.