expanded horizons.......................

      I started out wanting to be a Serious Southern Writer.  My mother had made me a reader and stressed the legacy of my family's Mississippi roots.  William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor were household names—Mississippians who had made people take notice. . . .

Well, I knew I wasn't one of those people.  I was too warped by the court-jester-like behavior that's essential to being a good stage performer.  I knew that whatever I wrote, it would have a heavy layer of humor.  By the time I expanded my horizons from three verses and a couple of choruses to short stories, and then prose, my sense of humor naturally came along for the ride.

     Besides, I don't have the talent to compete with the Great Serious Writers.  Anyway, writing is not a competition to me.  Writing is fun, and I am simply a storyteller.  I also really enjoy the self-discipline writing requires.

-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty