If you do your job right, no one realizes you did your job, and that's a good thing. You strive for that.
We are surrounded by story.
The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an amalgam, and it is impossible to know what moments, what foibles, what charms will come to define us once we're gone. All we can do is live our lives fully, be authentically ourselves, and trust that the right things about us, the best and most fitting things, will echo in the memories of us that endure.
Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.
In the reading and writing life, delight, for me, is where the mystery lies. Easy enough to figure out how scenes of violence or tragedy or titillation or grossness or even sentimentality can move us, but how the written word elicits delight - what Nabokov calls that shiver in the spine - is much harder to calculate and define.
A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.
I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.
Sometimes, Barack Obama is Martin Luther King, sometimes, he a black militant from the Sixties, then he's a Baptist minister. He can be so different. There's not yet an Obama voice.
Well, here's what you can do, and that's about it.
The future mathematician. . . should solve problems, choose the problems which are in his line, meditate upon their solution, and invent new problems. By this means, and by all other means, he should endeavor to make his first important discovery: he should discover his likes and dislikes, his taste, his own line.
Lincoln Chafee, former governor of Rhode Island, announced he's running for president. Before he announced he's running, his wife went on Facebook and asked his staff if they remembered his password. Because if a Facebook password is too hard to remember, the launch codes for the nukes should be a piece of cake.