The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.

My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.

I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.

Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself.

The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?

Absence becomes the greatest Presence.

It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!