Write About What You're Afraid Of.

I Keep Wondering If, Say, There Is Intelligent Life On Other Planets, The Scientists Argue That Something Like Two Percent Of The Other Planets Have The Conditions, The Physical Conditions, To Support Life In The Way It Happened Here, Did Christ Visit Each And Every Planet, Go Through The Same Routine, The Agony In The Garden, The Crucifixion, And So On.

Maybe Writing Can't Be Taught, But Editing Can Be Taught—prayer, Fasting And Self-mutilation.

The Task Is Not So Much To Solve Problems As To Propose Questions.

We Like Books That Have A Lot Of Dreck In Them, Matter Which Presents Itself As Not Wholly Relevant (or Indeed, At All Relevant) But Which, Carefully Attended To, Can Supply A Kind Of "sense" Of What Is Going On. This "sense" Is Not To Be Obtained By Reading Between The Lines (for There Is Nothing There, In Those White Spaces) But By Reading The Lines Themselves Looking At Them And So Arriving At A Feeling Not Of Satisfaction Exactly, That Is Too Much To Expect, But Of Having Read Them, Of Having "completed" Them.

It Is Difficult To Keep The Public Interested. The Public Demands New Wonders Piled On New Wonders. Often We Don't Know Where Our Next Marvel Is Coming From. The Supply Of Strange Ideas Is Not Endless.