I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.

the death of any loved parent is an incalculable lasting blow. Because no one ever loves you again like that.

...writing is not a performance but a generosity.

I know that we live after death and again and again, not in the memory of our children, or as a mulch for trees and flowers, however poetic that may be, but looking passionately and egocentrically out of our eyes.

The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

... the spirit, I think, is a stream, a fountain, and must be continually poured out, for only if it is poured out will more and clearer streams come.