Harriet Beecher Stowe was thirty-nine when she began Uncle Tom's Cabin. She had given birth to seven children and seen one die. She wrote her book to be serialized in an abolitionist newspaper. Much of it she composed on the kitchen table in between the cooking, mending, tending to her house.

There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence-an overwhelming determination to succeed.

So loving is the universe, so joyful, so determined to give us everything we need and to love us and show us the way to live, too, that we are beaten to the ground, boiled by God's waves, as we play in the surf.

Harriet Beecher Stowe thought Uncle Tom's Cabin was written through her by Another Hand, so little did she know what was going to happen from moment to moment in the book. She herself was amazed at what she was writing.

Prayer is a law of the universe, like gravity. You don't even have to believe in God to ask.

To believe in God or in a guiding force because someone tells you to is the height of stupidity. We are given senses to receive our information within. With our own eyes we see, and with our own skin we feel. With our intelligence, it is intended that we understand. But each person must puzzle it out for himself or herself.

A guest at a dinner party observed the strange expression on James Thurber's face. 'Don't be concerned,' said Thurber's wife. 'He's writing.'