The artist composes, writes, or paints just as he dreams, seizing whatever swims close to his net. This, not the world seen directly, is his raw material.

He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot...

Because his art is sucha difficult one, the writer is not likely to advance in the worldas visibly as do his neighbors: while his best friends from highschool or college are becoming junior partners in prestigiouslaw firms, or opening their own mortuaries, the writer may bestill sweating out his first novel.

The point is, whether or not they show it at dinner parties, writers learn, by a necessity of their trade, to be the sharpest of observers.