Most dangerously of all, such thinking assumes that if you cannot win, then you must not continue to play.

At the very least, she could have tricked everyone into forgetting that she’d once been Harper Lee. She could have tricked herself into forgetting that she’d once been Harper Lee, which might have been artistically liberating.

Just because creativity is mystical doesn’t mean it shouldn’t also be demystified—especially if it means liberating artists from the confines of their own grandiosity, panic, and ego.

It was a tale of enchantment, written under enchantment, and even a stranger could feel the fairy dust in it.

When that assistance does arrive—that sense of the moving sidewalk beneath my feet, the moving sidewalk beneath my words—I am delighted, and I go along for the ride. In such instances, I write like I am not quite myself. I lose track of time and space and self.

All I know for certain is that this is how I want to spend my life—collaborating to the best of my ability with forces of inspiration that I can neither see, nor prove, nor command, nor understand.

They just made stuff. So that’s what I decided to do: I decided to just go make stuff.