What gardening teaches us is that if you plant things, they'll come up. But you have to be willing to wait for them to bear fruit because things are seasonal.

As long as the Earth can make a spring every year, I can.

You must run around like a crazy person or walk sedately honoring the dead.

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

Only dead people need loud music, you know.

I can imagine in years to come that my papers and memorabilia, my journals and letters, will find themselves always in the company of people who care about many of the things I do.

I started writing as a child. But I didn't think of myself, actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something, no maybe junior and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.