Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.

life is always bringing unexpected gifts.

I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.

I find that when I have any appointment, even an afternoon one, it changes the whole quality of time. I feel overcharged. There is no space for what wells up from the subconscious; those dreams and images live in deep still water and simply submerge when the day gets scattered.

The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.