We Were Born To Die; We Were

No One Can Teach Writing, But Classes May Stimulate The Urge To Write. If You Are Born A Writer, You Will Inevitably And Helplessly Write. A Born Writer Has Self-knowledge. Read, Read, Read. And If You Are A Fiction Writer, Dont Confine Yourself To Reading Fiction. Every Writer Is First A Wide Reader.

In The Compact Between Novelist And Reader, The Novelist Promises To Lie, And The Reader Promises To Allow It.

Old Saws Have No Teeth.

History ... Isn't Simply What Has Happened. It's A Judgment On What Has Happened.

What's Impossible Not To Notice, Though - It's All Around Us - Is The Diminution Of American Prose: How Pedestrian It Has Become. Pick Up Any Short Story And Listen To Its Voice, The Tedious Easy Vernacular That Mistakes Transcription For Realism. This Would Display An Understandable Pragmatism If It Were A Pandering To Common-denominator Readers; But It Is, In Fact, A Kind Of Hifalultin Literary Ideology, The Less-is-more Hemingway Legacy Put Through An Up-to-the-minute Industrial Blender.