it was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.

What doesn't kill us gives us something new to write 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.

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.