When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love.

Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too.

I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.