I don't think you could teach someone to be a genius, but you can certainly teach them to not make rookie mistakes and to look at writing the way a writer looks at writing, and not just the way a reader looks at writing. There are a lot of techniques and skills that can be taught that will be helpful to anybody, no matter how gifted they are, and I think writing programs can be very good for people.

Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and grandfather, not even the drowning of his beloved brother, had ever broken his heart quite as terribly as the realization, when he was halfway to the rimed zinc hatch of the German station, that he was hauling a corpse behind him

. . .I really ought to have recognized it for what it was and, perhaps, to have stopped right there - for it was nostalgia, and what inspires nostalgia has been dead a long time

The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball," Peavine's book began, "whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself: to pay attention to it. When it comes to the position of catcher, as all but fools and shortstops will freely acknowledge, this solemn requirement is doubled.

The problems you have as a novelist tend to have to do with making a living and trying to find ways to supplement the income you get from writing novels. For a lot of writers, that involves teaching. In my case, so far, I've been able to get by working in Hollywood with this TV stuff I've been doing. And it's very important, because my wife is a writer, too, and we don't have health insurance through any employer.

I saw a lot of lousy movies and watched a ton of crappy television and read a bunch of utterly forgettable books and comics and listened to hours of junk music as a kid. And I'm still drawing profitably in my own art on some of the tawdry treasure I stored up in those years.

So it was scary, but that's how it goes. To my great delight, I discovered that it did all belong.