This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.

If you feel stuck in your life or in your art, few jump-starts are more effective than a week of reading deprivation. No reading? That's right: no reading. It is a paradox that by emptying our lives of distractions we are actually filling the well. Without distractions, we are once again thrust into the sensory world. With no newspaper to shiel us, a train becomes a viewing gallery. With novel to sink into (and no television to numb us out) an evening become a vast savannah in which furniture — and other assumptions — get rearranged. We are cast into our inner silence. Our reward will be a new outflow. Our own art, our own thoughts and feelings, will begin to nudge aside the sludge of blockage, to loosen it and move it upward and outward until once again our wellis running freely.

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

Writing is best broken down into a one-day-at-a-time, one-page-at-a-time process. We do not need the courage to write a whole novel. We need the courage only to write on the novel today. We do not need the courage to finish and publish a novel all in one fell swoop. All we need is the courage to do the next right thing. Today's pages may yield tomorrow's editing job and next month's design job, but just for today all we need to do is write.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

When we are focused on the possible, we are able to ignore the probable. We are able to set aside that tricky question of odss. The odds stacked against us as an artist immediately lessen if we are in fact doing our work. The odds of publishing a novel are a hell of a lot higher if you have written a novel. In other words, when we can focus on what it is we are doing, then what it is we could do becomes a logical progression and not a wild fantasy.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.