Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.

When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer.

Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalised such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though they can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. “Ah, the Night Sea Voyage!” we cry, feeling that we have understood something important — but we’ve merely recognised it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing.

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.

This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.