For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

You cultivate the subconscious by meditation, by sitting in silence and by not trying to control your thoughts. Then go someplace where you haven't been before, or go for a walk, a run, and look for signs of grace-an epiphany, something that comes to you.

'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat.

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

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.