When You Write, You Lay Out A

You Search, You Break Your Heart, Your Back, Your Brain, And Then-and Only Then-it Is Handed To You.

So The Midwest Nourishes Us [...] And Presents Us With The Spectacle Of A Land And A People Completed And Certain. And So We Run To Our Bedrooms And Read In A Fever, And Love The Big Hardwood Trees Outside The Windows, And The Terrible Midwest Summers, And The Terrible Midwest Winters [...]. And So We Leave It Sorrowfully, Having Grown Strong And Restless By Opposing With All Our Will And Mind And Muscle Its Simple, Loving, Single Will For Us: That We Stay, That We Stay And Find A Place Among Its Familiar Possibilities. Mother Knew We Would Go; She Encouraged Us.

Every Book Has An Intrinsic Impossibility, Which Its Writer Discovers As Soon As His First Excitement Dwindles.

No One Can Help You If You're Stuck In A Work. Only You Can Figure A Way Out, Because Only You Can See The Work's Possibilities.

The Universe Is Illusion Merely, Not One Speck Of It Real, And We Are Not Only Its Victims, Falling Always Into Or Smashed By A Planet Slung By The Sun-but Also Its Captives, Bound By The Mineral-made Ropes Of Our Senses.