‘Yes, but not like that – never before.’

‘Then why now? here? with us? All night I have been thinking and praying and wondering what I was to say to him, and now, this morning, he isn’t here at all. That was cruel of him, leaving without a word. I don’t want him to be ashamed – it’s being ashamed that makes it all so wrong of him.’

‘He’s ashamed of being unhappy,’ I said.

‘Mr Samgrass says he is noisy and high-spirited. I believe,’ she said, with a faint light of humour streaking the clouds, ‘I believe you and he tease Mr Samgrass rather. It’s naughty of you. I’m very fond of Mr Samgrass, and you should be too, after all he’s done for you. But I think perhaps if I were your age and a man I might be just a little inclined to tease Mr Samgrass myself. No, I don’t mind that, but last night and this morning are something quite different. You see, it’s all happened before.’ ‘I can only say I’ve seen him drunk often and I’ve been drunk with him often, but last night was quite new to me.’

Later in the course — the course of this arrangement of miscellaneous nonfiction by a habitual novelist and occasional short-storyteller who has also for three decades professed the reading and writing of fiction in American universities and along the way has entertained a couple of ideas at a time about literature — we may touch upon other principles and categories of literary titling and upon titling errors to be avoided.

They said she was just sixteen years old. I looked at the bridegroom carefully. Suddenly I recognised Julian Mastakovich, whom I had not seen again in all those five years. Then I looked at the bride again.–Good God! I made my way, as quickly as I could, out of the church. I heard gossiping in the crowd about the bride’s wealth–about her dowry of five hundred thousand rubles–so and so much for pocket money.

“Then his calculations were correct,” I thought, as I pressed out into the street.

The children were charming. They absolutely refused to resemble their elders, notwithstanding the efforts of mothers and governesses. In a jiffy they had denuded the Christmas tree down to the very last sweet and had already succeeded in breaking half of their playthings before they even found out which belonged to whom.

One of them was a particularly handsome little lad, dark-eyed, curly-haired, who stubbornly persisted in aiming at me with his wooden gun. But the child that attracted the greatest attention was his sister, a girl of about eleven, lovely as a Cupid. She was quiet and thoughtful, with large, full, dreamy eyes. The children had somehow offended her, and she left them and walked into the same room that I had withdrawn into. There she seated herself with her doll in a corner.

I do not know who wrote those words, but I have always liked them as a reminder that the future can be anything we want to make it. We can take the mysterious, hazy future and carve out of it anything that we can imagine, just as a sculptor carves a statue from a shapeless stone.

We are all in the position of the farmer. If we plant a good seed, we reap a good harvest. If our seed is poor and full of weeds, we reap a useless crop. If we plant nothing at all, we harvest nothing at all.

I want the future to be better than the past. I don’t want it contaminated by the mistakes and errors with which history is filled. We should all be concerned about the future because that is where we will spend the remainder of our lives.

The past is gone and static. Nothing we can do will change it. The future is before us and dynamic. Everything we do will affect it. Each day brings with it new frontiers, in our homes and in our business, if we only recognize them. We are just at the beginning of the progress in every field of human endeavor.

A sketchbook is like diary for an artist, a place where you can just let out all your art without any worries. Any person who wants to get better at drawing should have a sketchbook, because it not only records your ideas, thoughts and experimentations, but a sketchbook also gets you drawing and drawing, building your skills with every moment. You will see that the quality of your sketchbooks will be better and better, and what at first was dull then will become almost a work of art for itself.

In a sketchbook you can do anything you want, although some artist prefer to have sketchbooks based on themes. For example you could have a sketchbook only in human anatomy, and another just a “test sketchbook” where you try any kind of ideas that comes to your mind. And remember that sometimes is not all drawing on your sketchbook, you can write some ideas too, you thoughts, all this is valuable when years pass and you can have a better perspective of how your art has evolved.