You Only Grow By Coming

I Have A Process That I Seem To Always, To Some Degree, As A Writer, Adhere To, But I Certainly Have Never Imposed The Way I Write A Novel On My Students. When I Had Students, I Never Said, "you Should Never Start Writing A Novel Until You Have The Last Sentence." I Never Did That, And I Wouldn't Do It Now, But People Now Seem So Interested In The Process [of Writing Fiction] That I Have To Constantly Make It Clear When I Describe Mine That I'm Not Being Prescriptive. I'm Not Proselytizing.

The Gardener Had A Dread Of Small Women; He'd Always Imagined Them To Have An Anger Disproportionate To Their Size.

There Was No Manifestation Of Contemporary Culture That Did Not Indicate To My Grandmother How Steadfast Was The Nation's Decline, How Merciless Our Mental And Moral Deterioration, How Swiftly All-embracing Our Final Decadence. I Never Saw Her Read A Book Again; But She Referred To Books Often - As If They Were Shrines And Cathedrals Of Learning That Television Had Plundered And Then Abandoned.

Religious Freedom Should Work Two Ways: We Should Be Free To Practice The Religion Of Our Choice, But We Must Also Be Free From Having Someone Else's Religion Practiced On Us.

When I Was Still In Prep School - 14, 15 - I Started Keeping Notebooks, Journals. I Started Writing, Almost Like Landscape Drawing Or Life Drawing. I Never Kept A Diary, I Never Wrote About My Day And What Happened To Me, But I Described Things.