And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.

Movies are too literal.

It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.

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

I like commas. I detest semi-colons — I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.