When I have to deal with something that disturbs me as much as the botfly did, I write about it.

That’s why I’ve called this mild little essay “Furor Scribendi”—“A Rage for Writing.” “Rage,” “Positive Obsession,” “burning need to write” … Call it anything you like; it’s a useful emotion.

Read the kind of work you’d like to write. Read good literature and bad, fiction and fact. Read every day and learn from what you read.

I have no doubt at all that the best and the most interesting part of me is my fiction.

Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.

don’t worry about imagination. You have all the imagination you need, and all the reading, journal writing, and learning you will be doing will stimulate it. Play with your ideas. Have fun with them. Don’t worry about being silly or outrageous or wrong. So much of writing is fun. It’s first letting your interests and your imagination take you

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.

“Why,” she dared to ask, “do you look like a twice-live-sized, bearded white man?” In fact, seated as he was on his huge thronelike chair, he looked, she thought, like a living version of Michelangelo’s Moses, a sculpture that she remembered seeing pictured in her college art-history textbook about twenty years before. Except that God was more

“An old habit,” God said. “That’s the trouble with habits. They tend to outlive their usefulness.”