Now i no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.

I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.

It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.

You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.

He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.

Hatred is always a sin, my mother told me. Remember that. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn’t waste the milk.

Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?