Top Highlights

• a commercial airplane flight, he spares his readers a report of his experience. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know. The writer knows his field—what has been done, what could be done, the limits—the way a tennis player knows the court. And like that exper...
• Do not hurry; do not rest. —GOETHE
• Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality? Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did...
• One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will ...
• “The world is filled, and filled with the Absolute,” Teilhard de Chardin wrote. “To see this is to be made free.”