Suffering, violent suffering, seems to be something that corresponds with something that we experience.

Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armor themselves against wonder.

And may my bronze name / touch always her thousand fingers / grow brighter with her weeping / until I am fixed like a galaxy / and memorized / in her secret and fragile skies.

As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn't understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line.

I won't comment on what Bob Dylan said, but I will comment on his receiving the Nobel Prize, which to me is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.

I've never thought of myself as a singer anyway. . . I've been free from those considerations because so many people over the years told me I don't have a voice. I kind of bought that. I never thought that much about it to begin with. I knew I didn't have one of the great voices. As my Damon Runyanesque lawyer used to say, "none of you guys can sing. If I want to hear singing, I'll go to the Metropolitan Opera."

[Prozac] didn't seem to have any effect whatsoever on my melancholy, my dark vision, and everything else that I'd taken it for.