The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.

The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

Everybody acts as if they have free will. They act as if they can make these decisions; do they know they don't? I think there's been some back-down on the idea that everything is determined.

Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing.

I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn't know would be helped by it.