First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life.
Decades go faster toward the end of a century.
Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.
I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity.
The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.
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.