"In writing, as in all else, the quest is the thing ...

"You are never more alive yourself than when you struggle to create life from words. It is when you learn that writing is confrontation — part risk, part performance and an attempt to prove yourself again and again — that you acquire a more daring identity than you ever had before...

"You are all writers. You call yourselves this and therefore you are. It does not matter whether you have ever written a best seller, or won literary acclaim, or even if you have been published. Those are merely the trappings of a writer. They are not the core.

"My wish for you is that you understand that and that you appreciate the joy of giving life to characters who, regardless of how many people ever learn of their existence, do exist — because you created them."

— HWG Founder Robert Vaughan performing as Ernest Hemingway at the 1998 Heartland Writers Conference

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