The elasticity of imagination and compassion is what writing and reading promote.

When we read, even if the characters are tragic or sad or disturbing, these are our brothers and sisters in the human family.

Every writer can tell you that a book is only truly alive when it finds passionate readers who bring it alive in their imaginations.

But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention.

Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being.

For me, the writing life doesn't just happen when I sit at the writing desk. It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this: that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in. 'My heart keeps open house,' was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem. And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.

There is no end to what can be said about the world