Nothing Moves A Woman So

You Can, In Short, Lead The Life Of The Mind, Which Is, Despite Some Appalling Frustrations, The Happiest Life On Earth. And One Day, In The Thick Of This, Approaching Some Partial Vision, You Will (i Swear) Find Yourself On The Receiving End Of - Of All Things - An "idea For A Story," And You Will, God Save You, Start Thinking About Writing Some Fiction Of Your Own. Then You Will Understand, In What I Fancy Might Be A Blinding Flash, That All This Passionate Thinking Is What Fiction Is About, That All Those Other Fiction Writers Started As You Did, And Are Laborers In The Same Vineyard.

There Is A Certain Age At Which A Child Looks At You In All Earnestness And Delivers A Long, Pleased Speech In All The True Inflections Of Spoken English, But With Not One Recognizable Syllable. There Is No Way You Can Tell The Child That If Language Had Been A Melody, He Had Mastered It And Done Well, But That Since It Was In Fact A Sense, He Had Botched It Utterly.

As Soon As Beauty Is Sought Not From Religion And Love, But For Pleasure, It Degrades The Seeker.

Whenever An Encounter Between A Writer Of Good Will And A Regular Person Of Good Will Happens To Touch On The Subject Of Writing, Each Person Discovers, Dismayed, That Good Will Is Of No Earthly Use. The Conversation Cannot Proceed.

Let The Grass Die. I Let Almost All Of My Indoor Plants Die From Neglect While I Was Writing The Book. There Are All Kinds Of Ways To Live. You Can Take Your Choice. You Can Keep A Tidy House, And When St. Peter Asks You What You Did With Your Life, You Can Say, I Kept A Tidy House, I Made My Own Cheese Balls.