Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.

Nobody can live on a bridge or plant potatoes but it is fine for comings and goings, meetings, partings and long views and a real connection to someplace else where you may in the crazy weathers of struggle how and again want to be.

I did not always know I would be a writer. Until I had a room of my own, I did not write much at all - no more than any other child who read a lot of books. I began to write fiction and poetry when I first had a room that was truly my own with a door that shut and some measure, however fragile, of privacy.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

I don't even remember what Mother and I quarreled about: it is a continual quarrel that began when I reached puberty.