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

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or her to speak, rather than speaking for them, in an older style of omniscient narration.

Of course, both [Oscar] Wilde & [Vladimir] Nabokov believe in many things, and these things emerge in their writing clearly - for Wilde, the folly of humankind and the (romantic) grandeur of the heroic, lone individual (not unlike Wilde himself); for Nabokov, the possibility of a kind of transcendence through a great, prevailing, superior sort of love (especially in Ada, the most self-congratulatory of novels.)

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.