It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable.

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

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool - and I'm not any of those - to say that I don't write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

If you're a human being, you can attempt to do what other human beings have done. We don't understand talent any more than we understand electricity.

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

By no amount of agile exercising of a wistful imagination could my mother have been called lenient. Generous she was; indulgent never. Kind, yes, permissive, never. In her world, people she accepted paddled their own canoes, pulled their own weight, put their own shoulders to their own plows and pushed like hell.

The music was my friend, my lover, my family.