So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.

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.

When I am alone the flowers are really seen; I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die...they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days; they keep me closely in touch with the process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments.

I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.

I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.

Pain can make a whole winter bright, like fever, force us to live deep and hard.

Solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people... precludes awareness of one's self so that after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.