Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness and they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy, or they become legends.

That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.

Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.

The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.

Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly, and this frequently trips our often infantile sense of justice.

We Americans are trained to think big, talk big, act big, love big, admire bigness but then the essential mystery is in the small.

Poetry at its best is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.