There is a truth about the Workshop experience, recognizable to generation after generation of its graduates, and Saul Maloff wrote about it in a fine piece for the New York Times book section. In its summary he points out that there is always a student like the one he recalls from Flannery O'Connor's class, whom everyone recognizes as destiny's choice, born a writer, brilliant, poised for the masterpiece that will mark the times and then, in subsequent years, just disappears—leaves not a trace.
        —John Legget, Workshop director 1969-1987

I but barely glanced at the middle of the first page of your Letter, & have seen no more of it—not from resentment (God forbid!) but from the state of my bodily & mental sufferings, that scarcely permitted human fortitude to let in a new visitor of affliction. The object of my present reply is to state the case just as it is—first, that for years the anguish of my spirit has been indescribable, the sense of my danger staring, but the conscience of my GUILT worse, far far worse than all!—I have prayed with drops of agony on my Brow, trembling not only before the Justice of my Maker, but even before the Mercy of my Redeemer. "I gave thee so many Talents. What hast thou done with them"?
        —S.T. Coleridge, letter to Joseph Cottle, 26 April 1814

HAMM:
A little poetry.
(Pause.)
You prayed—
(Pause. He corrects himself.)
You CRIED for night; it comes—
(Pause. He corrects himself.)
It FALLS: now cry in darkness.
(He repeats, chanting.)
You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness.
(Pause.)
Nicely put, that.
(Pause.)
And now?
        —Samuel Beckett, Endgame