It has always seemed to me that if you could talk about your work in fully-formed phrases, you wouldn't write it. The writing is the statement, you see, and it seems to me that the poem or the story or the novel you write is the kind of metaphor you cast on life.

A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.

But memory, after a time, dispenses its own emphasis, making a feuilleton of what we once thought most ponderable, laying its wreath on what we never thought to recall.

The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.

How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks.

The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.

But the trek that starts with the feet always rises in time to the head. There had never been any of mankind's that didn't.