Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.

I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.

Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.

I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.