When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It’s sacred and it’s secret, even to the writer.

When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.

The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.

My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.

America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.