“Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see, and they will not be a substitute for seeing.” - Flannery O’Connor (Mystery & Manners)

"First, say one true thing. Then say another true thing. Repeat until you find that your true things aren’t true any more — then go back and pick up the trail. To write an essay, you must first write a paragraph. To write a paragraph, you must first write a sentence. To write a sentence, you must first write the first word.

Don’t overcomplicate

[D]o not depend on the hope of results . . . [Y]ou may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the

A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding. When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger. I had a slight temperature last week; almost the whole day was

“Never let anyone change what you came to the page to do.”

Lee Martin, in the last writing class of my MFA

If there is any one comment about life which is not disputable, it is that life is not teachable. We can't even teach our children not to make a mistake we made. But life is certainly re-creatable, in fiction. And that is how fiction, if it is good enough, serves us. We can each of us become another, see through his eyes, live through his life. If

Don't wait for external validation or approval. Write exactly the way you want, write all the time, write against the rules and with the rules, invent your own rules, break the rules you've invented, send out your work for publication but don't feel crushed if it doesn't get published, keep writing, keep reading the idiosyncratic books that teach

“I believe a man should live in his own country and I think the deracination of human beings leads to frustration, in one way or another obstructing the light of the soul. I can live only in my own country. I cannot live without having my feet and my hands on it and my ear against it, without feeling the movement of its waters and its shadows,

"...The function of freedom is to free somebody else“ - Toni Morrison