Perhaps this very instant is your time.

But it's silly to suggest the writing of poetry is something ethereal, a sort of soul-crashing, devastating emotional experience that wrings you. I have no fancy ideas about poetry. ... It doesn't come to you on the wings of a dove. It's something you have to work hard at.

The art of one period cannot be approached through the attitudes (emotional or intellectual) of another.

O remember In your narrowing dark hours That more things move Than blood in the heart.

True revolutions in art restore more than they destroy.

The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.

All art, in spite of the struggles of some critics to prove otherwise, is based on emotion and projects emotion.