I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.

Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.

Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.

I have committed many sins in my life. This precise sin-the sin against poets-is without absolution.

I worry about images. Images are what things mean.