You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.

We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. It is our minds that either open or close.

Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones out of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

I remember a friend many years ago who had taped a sign to his refrigerator: There's a dream dreaming us. If you try to think about what that means it makes your mind silly, but that silliness is good.

We are each a concert reverberating with our whole lives and reflecting and amplifying the world around us.

After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.