Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.

Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.

She had her reasons. Not that they were the same as anybody else's reasons.

This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath.

I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.

The characters [of The Tempest] have always been favorites of mine. It is one of his meditations on art - what it does.

All writers must go from now to once a upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.