"Literature is my game. I hand the playing cards to the next generations: Emma Bovary and Jay Gatsby, Hester Prynne and Othello, Medea, Newland Archer and Daisy Miller - their stories are what carry me back into the classroom each day; they are the reason I get out of bed. The thing I might not really wish to look at is that their stories may have been so compelling, they allowed me to put off creating my own. As the joke goes, 'When Mozart was your age, he'd been dead for thirteen years.'"
From The Season of Second Chances
