To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.

Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

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

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.

Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce.