To Desire To Be What One Can

Novels Are Routinely Denigrated When Characters Are Not Found To Be Likable. Is Raskolnikov Likable? Is King Lear? The Plethora Of Such Naive Readers Testifies To A Failure Of Imagination - The Capacity To See Into Unfamiliar Lives, Motives, Feelings - And This Failure Must, At Least In Part, Be The Failure Of The Teaching Of Literature In The Schools.

No One Can Teach Writing, But Classes May Stimulate The Urge To Write. If You Are Born A Writer, You Will Inevitably And Helplessly Write. A Born Writer Has Self-knowledge. Read, Read, Read. And If You Are A Fiction Writer, Dont Confine Yourself To Reading Fiction. Every Writer Is First A Wide Reader.

Whoever Mourns The Dead Mourns Himself.

The Butterfly Lures Us Not Only Because He Is Beautiful, But Because He Is Transitory. The Caterpillar Is Uglier, But In Him We Can Regard The Better Joy Of Becoming.

It's True That The Young Who Now Flock To Script Writing, Or Producing And Directing, To Fulfill The Demands Of These New Devices Would, In An Earlier Period, Have Been Submitting To Magazines And Working On Their First Novels. But Even In The Midst Of All These "digital Products," The Wonder Of It Is That There Are Still So Many Young Writers Who Continue To Believe In The Venerable Print Novel As The Corridor To Fame And Fortune.