If You Write Well, You

To Live A Very Long Time... Is Supposed To Be The Desired Object Of All Human Life. But It Is Not. The Main Thing Is To Ride The Flood Tide... How Glorious It Is To Create! For Those Few Moments Of A Lifetime When The Stream Is Running Full And Deep: Those Are The Justification For Everything.

It Takes An Awful Lot Of Time For Me To Write Anything. I Have Endless Drafts, One After Another; And I Try Out 50, 75, Or A Hundred Variations On A Single Line Sometimes. I Work On The Process Of Refining Low-grade Ore. I Get Maybe A Couple Of Nu Ggets Of Gold Out Of 50 Tons Of Dirt. It Is Tough For Me. No, I Am Not Inspired.

There Are So Many Selves In Everybody, And Just To Explore And Exploit One Is Wrong, Dead Wrong, For The Creative Person.

The Women Of The South Have Brought Into American Literature A Unique Mixture Of Domesticity And Grotesquerie.

William Packard Surely Must Be One Of The Great Editors Of Our Time.