What a beautiful testament to the creative spirit and its true motives, to creative contribution coming from a place of purpose rather than a hunger for profit.

I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.

Garages, barns and attics are always older than the buildings to which they are attached.

[I had a sense of interior panic].Always. I didn't really know what to call it for a long time, but I have a friend in Greece who used that word panic a lot, and I found myself resisting it, until I totally accepted that as a precise description of my interior condition. It was mostly panic from one moment to the next. And nothing much else was going on.

Seriousness is not Calvinistic, it's not a renunciation, it's the very opposite of that.

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.

To keep our hearts open is probably the most urgent responsibility you have as you get older.