One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

Use original detail in your writing. Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else.

At the moment our rational mind stops, hits against a wall ... something else happens. And a bigger mind, like a pearl, rolls in a silver bowl.

I told all kinds of stories about going to Japan, about playing ball with my father... I wanted to record my life in case it was going to end soon. So, I wrote that and it was very comforting to have that practice in the afternoons in my living room. I just wrote about my life.

We have to accept ourselves in order to write. Now none of us does that fully: few of us do it even halfway. Don’t wait for one hundred percent acceptance of yourself before you write, or even eight percent acceptance. Just write. The process of writing is an activity that teaches us about acceptance.

The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter; the act of writing does.

I wonder if I don't give too much of myself to writing: I am always half where I am; the other half is feeding the furnace, kick-starting the heat of creativity. I am making love with someone but at the same time I'm noticing how this graceful hand across my belly might just fit in with the memory of lilacs in Albuquerque in 1974.