You don't teach information in a writing workshop.

Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.

There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.

The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.

You don't teach information in a writing workshop.

The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. So many of the things in our world lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it’s one of the affirming arts. A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act.

Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he'd led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity - its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.