Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.

What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?

The body is a universe in itself and must be held as sacred as anything in creation....It is dangerous to forget the body as sacramental.

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.

Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing.

... if one does not have wild dreams of achievement, there is no spur even to get the dishes washed. One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

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