of all the foolish Fears of Humankind, Fear of the Future is by far the most foolish.

I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me.

Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.

Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth) I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

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.

As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn't care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you.