Life Would Be Grand If It Weren't

It's Not Possible To Advise A Young Writer Because Every Young Writer Is So Different. You Might Say, "read," But A Writer Can Read Too Much And Be Paralyzed. Or, "don't Read, Don't Think, Just Write," And The Result Could Be A Mountain Of Drivel. If You're Going To Be A Writer You'll Probably Take A Lot Of Wrong Turns And Then One Day Just End Up Writing Something You Have To Write, Then Getting It Better And Better Just Because You Want It To Be Better, And Even When You Get Old And Think, "there Must Be Something Else People Do," You Won't Be Able To Quit.

In Dreams You Can Have The Feeling That You've Had This Dream Before, That You Have This Dream Over And Over Again, And You Know That It's Really Nothing That Simple. You Know That There's A Whole Underground System That You Call 'dreams,' Having Nothing Better To Call Them, And That This System Is Not Like Roads Or Tunnels But More Like A Live Body Network, All Coiling And Stretching, Unpredictable But Finally Familiar - Where You Are Now, Where You've Always Been.

I Want The Reader To Feel Something Is Astonishing. Not The 'what Happens,' But The Way Everything Happens. These Long Short Story Fictions Do That Best, For Me.

I Used To Feel For Years And Years And Years That I Was Very Remiss Not To Have Written A Novel And I Would Question People Who Wrote Novels And Try To Find Out How They Did It And How They Had Got Past Page 30. Then, With The Approach Of Old Age, I Began To Just Think: “well, Lucky I Can Do Anything At All.

Hatred Is Always A Sin, My Mother Told Me. Remember That. One Drop Of Hatred In Your Soul Will Spread And Discolor Everything Like A Drop Of Black Ink In White Milk. I Was Struck By That And Meant To Try It, But Knew I Shouldn’t Waste The Milk.