Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.

Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.

My heart is broken,” she goes. “It’s turned to a piece of stone. I’m no good. That’s what’s as bad as anything, that I’m no good anymore.

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.

When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.

If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.

What good are insights? They only make things worse.