Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.

The ancients believed in fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.

Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.

My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.

I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.

To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.

As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself.