There are no magics or elves / Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must / Wizard a track through our own screaming weed.

What, what am I to do with all of this life?

I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don't pay attention 'cause it probably has floated into somebody else's head.

Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.

When white and black meet today, sometimes there is a ready understanding that there has been an encounter between two human beings. But often there is only, or chiefly, an awareness that Two Colors are in the room.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.

She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing "happens." That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.