Fiction Leaves Us So Much Work To

When You Have Committed Enough Words To Paper, You Feel You Have A Spine Stiff Enough To Stand Up In The Wind. But When You Stop Writing, You Find That's All You Are - A Spine, A Row Of Rattling Vertebrae, Dried Out Like An Old Quill Pen.

In Terms Of Essays, I Would Say Oliver Sacks. His Breadth Of Hard Knowledge And Imagination And Empathy Seems To Constitute The Perfect Mind To Me.

Write A Book You'd Like To Read. If You Wouldn't Read It, Why Would Anybody Else? Don't Write For A Perceived Audience Or Market. It May Well Have Vanished By The Time Your Book's Ready.

The Writer I Adore Is Ivy Compton-burnett.i Couldn't Get More Than A Few Pages In When I First Read Her. In Many Ways, She Is Very Clumsy And Her Plots Are Rubbish. But We Don't Read Her For That. There Are Pages And Pages Of Dialogue. What It Requires Is Real Effort And Attention.

Fiction Isn't Made By Scraping The Bones Of Topicality For The Last Shreds And Sinews, To Be Processed Into Mechanically Recovered Prose. Like Journalism, It Deals In Ideas As Well As Facts, But Also In Metaphors, Symbols And Myths.