Writers would be warm, loyal, and otherwise terrific people-if only they'd stop writing.

The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. [...] First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever.

Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.

Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.

Make no mistake, the organizations website counsels. You will be writing a lot of crap. And thats a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. I am not the first person to point out that writing a lot of crap doesnt sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, even if it is November.