At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting

The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.

No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.

It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death-emotions that appear to have developed upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence. All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.

Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. . . . Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.