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1 " Many skills, as every successful entrepreneur knows, cannot be taught in school. They require doing. Sometimes a life of doing. And where money-making is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-shit-just-sits-there-until-it-rains poverty to which-of-my-toilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out. "
― Mohsin Hamid , How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
2 " After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first " real writer" he had ever met. " He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (1983). " I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student " close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was " not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the " nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. " In the best fiction," he wrote " the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the ‘moved’ character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional " funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called " those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. " Art is not self-expression," he insisted, " it’s communication. "
3 " After I left school, where I studied art, photography and textiles at A-level, I started doing an apprenticeship in interior design, but I wasn't really enjoying it very much, so I decided to do something creative, and in 2009, I began blogging. "
