In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about.

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.

The out-dated imagery of sitting over a dusty typewriter staring at blank pages for years is a fallacy and probably designed to keep you from living up to your fullest potential.

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth__ ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

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