“There, stacked high on his desk, was a tower of paper. Thick slabs of manuscript. Slush. Unsolicited, unagented, unloved. This was where dreams came to die. Book proposals, cover letters, entire manuscripts – they gathered like so much detritus on the desks of publishers everywhere.”

“On Memory: Imagine a desk covered with papers. That is everything you are thinking about. Now imagine a stack of file drawers behind it. That is everything you know. The trick is to keep the desk and the file drawers as close to one another as possible, and the papers neatly stacked.”

“Turning a manuscript into a book is easy; getting the manuscript ready to become a book is hard.”

“As good as' always spells mediocrity. But when a writer's work is in competition with all those thousands of other manuscripts that pour over an editor's desk, he cannot afford to be 'as good as'; he (or she) must be 'better than.”

“There was light and there was darkness, and where once, so recently, he had sat at his desk bathed in that light, now he was clothed in the black cover of heartbreak.”

“Nathaniel, who has failed as a writer, decides to commit suicide. He loads his revolver, places it at his side on his desk, and starts to write his letter of farewell. The letter lengthens, brightens, breathes, lives. It is the Masterpiece, the yearned-for Masterpiece! In order to publish it, Nathaniel does not commit suicide.”