Short Stories Demand A Certain

Once, In A Dry Season, I Wrote In Large Letters Across Two Pages Of A Notebook That Innocence Ends When One Is Stripped Of The Delusion That One Likes Oneself. Although Now, Some Years Later, I Marvel That A Mind On The Outs With Itself Should Have Nonetheless Made Painstaking Record Of Its Every Tremor, I Recall With Embarrassing Clarity The Flavor Of Those Particular Ashes. It Was A Matter Of Misplaced Self-respect.

My Own Fantasies Of What Life Would Be Like At 24 Tended To The More Spectacular.

I Can't Imagine Writing If I Didn't Have A Reader. Any More Than An Actor Can Imagine Acting Without An Audience.

The Impulse For Much Writing Is Homesickness. You Are Trying To Get Back Home, And In Your Writing You Are Invoking That Home, So You Are Assuaging The Homesickness.

To Have That Sense Of One's Intrinsic Worth Which Constitutes Self-respect Is Potentially To Have Everything.