I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

I have respect for the past, but I'm a person of the moment.

Take the blinders from your vision take the padding from your ears and confess you've heard me crying and admit you've seen my tears.

Living a life is like constructing a building: if you start wrong, you'll end wrong.

I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money.' Yes, I think everybody should be paid handsomely; I insist on it, and I pay people who work for me, or with me, handsomely.

Happiness is a chance to talk to a friend, to hear good music, to have a good glass of wine. Happiness is a chance to be myself and to find people with whom I agree or who I don't agree but I can learn something.

And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.