To Want To Be What One Can

Above All, A Book Is A Riverbank For The River Of Language. Language Without The Riverbank Is Only Television Talk - A Free Fall, A Loose Splash, A Spill.

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.

I Measure My Life In Sentences Pressed Out, Line By Line, Like The Lustrous Ooze On The Underside Of The Snail, The Snail's Secret Open Seam, Its Wound, Leaking Attar.

Fiction Does Not Invent Out Of A Vacuum, But It Invents; And What It Invents Is, First, The Fabric And Cadence Of Language, And Then A Slant Of Idea That Sails Out Of These As A Fin Lifts From The Sea.

Life Is That Which - Pressingly, Persistently, Unfailingly, Imperially - Interrupts.