In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.

Yet the fact had no consciousness of itself except through me.

Shakespeare would seem to have been a person for whom the human voice/personality in all its splendid idiosyncrasy was absolutely enthralling.

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

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.

Art is a means of memorialization of the past, a record of a rapidly vanishing world; a means of exorcising, at least temporarily, the ravages of homesickness. To speak of 'what is past, or passing or to come'-in the most meticulous language thereby to assure its permanence; to honor those we've loved and learned from and must outlive.

Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?