When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed.

My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business, and we aren't told that difficult or painful things won't happen, just that it matters. It matters not just to us but to the entire universe.

I would like to travel light on this journey of life, to get rid of the encumbrances I acquire each day. . . . The most difficult thing to let go is my self, that self which, coddled and cozened, becomes smaller as it becomes heavier. I don't understand how and why I come to be only as I lose myself, but I know from long experience that this is so.

Love. That was what she had that IT did not have.

If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.

Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.