And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.

Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.

I lived in New York for a couple months. It seemed to me at first an incredibly clean place with well-dressed people and washed cars and bright-painted red-and-yellow streetcars and white buildings.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy.

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.

A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.