There you are, and even if you are the slowest of scribes and the worst of touch typists, a trail of words is getting laid down, and you want to keep going; and then you reread it. Perhaps you don't dare to be satisfield, but at the same time you like what you've written. You find yourself taking pleasure - a reader's pleasure - in what's there on the page.

--Susan Sontag





Of course the writer cannot always burn with a hard gemlike flame or a white heat, but it should be possible to be a chubby hot-water bottle, rendering maximum attentiveness in the most enterprising sentences.

--Paul West