landscape, that vast still life, invites description, not narration. It is lyric. It has no story: it is the beloved, and asks only to be contemplated.

If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.

Prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear on all that is.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

The paradox: there can be no pilgrimage without a destination, but the destination is also not the real point of the endeavor. Not the destination, but the willingness to wander in pursuit characterizes pilgrimage. Willingness: to hear the tales along the way, to make the casual choices of travel, to acquiesce even to boredom. That's pilgrimage -- a mind full of journey.

We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something--make something--with it. A story, we sense is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.

Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.