I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.

There's another part of getting older that's just wonderful. Which is you see the way the stories turn out with peoples' lives.

It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.

I believe that there's a force of life in the universe, and that when we're writing or making music or painting, we're likely to connect with that flow.

Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love.

art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.

Books go out into the world, travel mysteriously from hand to hand, and somehow find their way to the people who need them at the times when they need them ... Cosmic forces guide such passings-along.