Everyone Is Entitled To An *informed* Opinion.

Everybody Has A Talent, Whether It's Scrapbooking, Or Kite-flying, Or Brain Surgery, Or Writing, Everybody Has A Talent. And If They Discover It, And They Turn It To Their Purposes And Make A Living Out Of It, Then They Become Not "that Person," But They Become "that Writer" Or "that Doctor" Or "that Supervisor."

I Never Send A Story Off Until I Have Read It Aloud To At Least Two Or Three People. Because When I Read - And I Don't Need Their Criticism, What I Need Is My Own - When I Read It Aloud, There Is A Flow, There Is A Poetry To It.

With The Internet, The Greatest Disseminator Of Bad Data And Bad Information The Universe Has Ever Known, It's Become Impossible To Trust Any News From Any Source At All, Because It's Filtered Through This Crazy Yenta Gossip Line. It's Impossible To Know Anything.

Because The Chief Commodity A Writer Has To Sell Is His Courage. And If He Has None, He Is More Than A Coward. He Is A Sellout And A Fink And A Heretic, Because Writing Is A Holy Chore.

We Walked For Some Time, And Grew To Know Each Other, As Best As We'd Allow. These Are Some Of The High Points. They Lack Continuity. I Don't Apologize. I Merely Pointed It Out, Adding With Some Truth, I Feel, That Most Liaisons Lack Continuity. We Find Ourselves In Odd Places At Various Times, And For A Brief Span We Link Our Lives To Others And Then, Our Time Elapsed, We Move Apart. Through A Haze Of Pain Occasionally, Usually Through A Veil Of Memory That Clings, Then Passes, Sometimes As Though We Have Never Touched.