From Shirley Jackson’s essay “How I Write,” publishing recently in the collection Let Me Tell You:

Once, however, when I had spent all one rainy day wrestling with my old refrigerator, whose doors tended to jam shut, my youngest daughter asked why I didn’t open it by magic.

It was a lot pleasanter to abandon the refrigerator and sit down and write a story about opening it by magic than to go on being sore at it and banging it with my first; we had to out for dinner, but course that’s all right with me anytime. The story, by the way, paid for a new refrigerator, which is certainly better than trying to open the old one without magic.