To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

We all think were going to be great and we feel a little bit robbed when our expectation aren't met, but sometimes our expectations sell us short. Sometimes the expected simply pales in comparison to the Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: the power to see, to sense, and to say. That is, he is perceptive, he is feeling, and he has the power to express in language what he observes and reacts to.

This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.

I can speak of my own criterion for judging whether or not a book is good or bad. I ask of it a single question, From how deep and true an impulse did it spring? Was it written merely to shock? Only to make money? Or was it written to create something more perfect and more lasting than the life experience from which it came?