In highly polished prose filled with humor and perception, this individual take on what it means to be a writer offers insight into aesthetics, metaphysics, ethics, and logic. The witty aphorisms and essays draw from the author's influences--Blake, Cervantes, Kierkegaard, Neitzsche, Baudelaire, and Kafka--and comment on the writing process. This epistemology is at once literary criticism of these influences and a deep and tender philosophical chronicle of a writer's life.