Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.

For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.

It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

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

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.