Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.

Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange.

You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.

I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.