You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist.

If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent

I finally smiled, remembering something I heard Ram Dass say on the radio once, about somebodyism—how most of us are raised to be somebodies and what a no-win game that is to buy into, because while you may turn out to be much more somebody than somebody else, a lot of other people are going to be a lot more somebody than you. And you are going to

“If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it.”

Here is the best true story on giving I know, and it was told by Jack Kornfield of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre. An eight-year-old boy had a younger sister who was dying of leukemia, and he was told that without a blood transfusion she would die. His parents explained to him that his blood was probably compatible with hers, and if

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and

Annie Dillard has said that day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more.

Some people may have thought that this book was too personal, too confessional. But what these people think about me is none of my business.

draft. Then take out as many of the excesses as you can. One thing I haven’t told you about my famous short story “Arnold” is that besides sending it off every few months to my father’s agent, I also sent it off to an important magazine editor. He sent it back with the following note: “You have made the mistake of thinking that everything that has