The Three of them were beautiful, in the way all girls of that age are beautiful. It can't be helped, that sort of beauty, nor can it be conserved; it's a freshness, a plumpness of the cells, that's unearned and temporary, and that nothing can replicate. None of them was satisfied with it, however; already they were making attempts to alter themselves into some impossible, imaginary mould, plucking and pencilling away at their faces. I didn't blame them, having done the same once myself.

Make the verses flow together. If a following verse has nothing to do with the previous, you may lose our listener/reader. You want a smooth flow to hear or read, and it's easier to memorize.

This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.

Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.

Write down the thoughts and even more, write down a specific line. If you don't, it'll fly away forever.

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

Everybody was going along thinking that it was a day like any other day, and bang, down went the Twin Towers. Changed everything. So you can't really predict the future, but you can say, "Boy, are those glaciers ever melting." You can measure that, and you can say, "When they're all melted there won't be any Athabasca River," and you can say, "What will happen to the oil sands then?" because you need a lot of water to make that oil. "Where's that going to come from?" You can say things like that.