It’s not facts that are important but what we say about them.

MFA in a Box is designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor — but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor keeps it from being laugh-out-loud funny.

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

Well, look at it another way: why shouldn’t there be cats in a zoo?" I said.

"They’re animals, too, right?"

"Cats and dogs are your run-of-the-mill-type animals. Nobody’s going to pay money to see them," he said. "Just look around you-they’re everywhere. Same thing with people.

Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.

My first semester, I got a D in creative writing.