"He sent the trained dog that is his talent off in search of a fat glorious pheasant, and it brought back the lower half of a Barbie doll."

"13. When a young person first decides he wants to write, a number of mountains spring up around him, labeled with the names of his heroes. Hemingway Mountain, let’s say. He heads up it, armed with his love for Hemingway. At some point, he starts to get tired. Tired of imitating. Tired of the low-ceiling feeling of trying to express his reality in someone else’s voice. Tired of the way that, by trying to sound and think like someone else, he is falsifying: selling his own experience of life short, omitting things he knows are true, adding in things he knows aren’t. If he’s lucky enough to realize this, he trudges back down off Hemingway Mountain and starts over again. Ah, look: Toni Morrison Mountain. That’s more like it. Rinse, lather, repeat. Then one day—maybe age has something to do with it, or something difficult happens that brings him to a boil—he snaps. No more imitation. That’s it. Something breaks. He starts sounding … like himself. Or at least he doesn’t sound like anyone…