Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.

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

Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.

That was in Crescent City, California, up near the Oregon border. I left soon after. But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber's chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber's fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, the hair already starting to grow.

Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

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.