"What advice do you have for aspiring writers?"

"The work is in the work itself. If she writes a lot, that's good. If she revises a lot, that's even better. She should not only write about what she knows but about what she doesn't know. It extends the imagination."

-- Toni Morrison (10 Questions, pg4, Time May 19)

I am surprised that she is truly talking about her type of writing, Pulitzer and Nobel types. I had to pause ten seconds before realizing  that she could not possibly know anything about another type of writing, that is, proposal writing.

"Which of your feats has been your favorite"

"London (where Blaine lived in a clear box suspended over the Thames without food for 44 days)...Every time you taste water, it's so sweet--at least for the first 28 days, until you shift to digesting your organ walls, and then it begins to taste like sulfur and becomes horrific. I got liver an kidneys failure from that one. "

-- David Blaine, the magician an endurance artist (pg 17, Time May 19)

This is almost unbelievable except that some of my friends and I myself had some sort of similar experience. The time durations for us varied. Every time we tested something, it worked--at least for the first week or two, until suddenly we were banging our heads to the wall, and nothing tested worked any more and it became horrific. Have you figured out which feat I was talking about? You probably would not anyway, if you happened to perform the same feat. We all got permanent head damage from that one.