Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.

There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.

Something’s died in me,” she goes. “It took a long time for it to do it, but it’s dead. You’ve killed something, just like you’d took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.

Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.

All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I'm wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don't know anything, and I'm the first one to admit it.