If You Get The Landscape Right, The

What I Find To Be Very Bad Advice Is The Snappy Little Sentence, 'write What You Know.' It Is The Most Tiresome And Stupid Advice That Could Possibly Be Given. If We Write Simply About What We Know We Never Grow. We Don't Develop Any Facility For Languages, Or An Interest In Others, Or A Desire To Travel And Explore And Face Experience Head-on. We Just Coil Tighter And Tighter Into Our Boring Little Selves. What One Should Write About Is What Interests One.

Walking On The Land Or Digging In The Fine Soil I Am Intensely Aware That Time Quivers Slightly, Changes Occurring In Imperceptible And Minute Ways, Accumulating So Subtly That They Seem Not To Exist. Yet The Tiny Shifts In Everything--cell Replication, The Rain Of Dust Motes, Lengthening Hair, Wind-pushed Rocks--press Inexorably On And On.

In A Rough Way The Short Story Writer Is To The Novelist As A Cabinetmaker Is To A House Carpenter.

We're All Strange Inside. We Learn How To Disguise Our Differences As We Grow Up.

What We Fear We Often Rage Against.