Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal.

I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.