I spent so much time thinking about regret. Regret and its accompanying conviction that there is a perfect, placid life, one's own alternate existence, pristine and simple, existing in a neighboring reality in which certain turns in the road were never set upon. And it isn't true. Any of it. I knew that. I had learned it. But it is an irresistible fantasy, if only because it implies we have some control over our fates.

The process of self-invention is never-ending; writer, like children, are always growing into their gifts. (Susan Larson in a "Times-Picayune" book review.

Write the ending first and then you'll know before the opening sentence that it's going to be a good book.

...it's not the medium that's the message - it's consciousness - the wonder of being able to wonder ...

Just write. That's my only tip. And read. I guess that's two.

Don't think too much. There'll be time to think later. Analysis won't help. You're chiseling now. You're passing your hands over the wood. Now the page is no longer blank. There's something there. It isn't your business yet to know whether it's going to be prize-worthy someday, or whether it will gather dust in a drawer. Now you've carved the tree. You've chiseled the marbled. You've begun.