The Ordinary Is The Divine.

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.

After A Certain Number Of Years, Our Faces Become Our Biographies.

An Essay Is A Thing Of The Imagination. If There Is Information In An Essay, It Is By-the-by, And If There Is An Opinion, One Need Not Trust It For The Long Run. A Genuine Essay Rarely Has An Educational, Polemical, Or Sociopolitical Use; It Is The Movement Of A Free Mind At Play.

Godlessness Invariably Produces Vulgarity. Civilization Is The Product Of Belief.

What's Impossible Not To Notice, Though - It's All Around Us - Is The Diminution Of American Prose: How Pedestrian It Has Become. Pick Up Any Short Story And Listen To Its Voice, The Tedious Easy Vernacular That Mistakes Transcription For Realism. This Would Display An Understandable Pragmatism If It Were A Pandering To Common-denominator Readers; But It Is, In Fact, A Kind Of Hifalultin Literary Ideology, The Less-is-more Hemingway Legacy Put Through An Up-to-the-minute Industrial Blender.