Poetry is a dumb Buddha who thinks a donkey is as important as a diamond.

We shouldn't forget that the universe moves with us, is at our back with everything we do.

I still write with pen and paper and have someone type it on a computer. But rewriting I do by hand.

The first thing is how awful cancer was, the experience. When you first go through it, you're just trying to survive. But when I wrote about it, I really digested it. It was unbearable but I had practice behind me.

Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other's presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our lifeforce, and then we go on carrying that person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, 'Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place.' This is how we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on.

This is what metaphor is. It is not saying that an ant is an elephant. Perhaps; both are alive. No. Metaphor is saying the ant is an elephant. Now, logically speaking, I know there is a difference. If you put elephants and ants before me, I believe that every time I will correctly identify the elephant and the ant. So metaphor must come from a very different place than that of the logical, intelligent mind. It comes from a place that is very courageous, willing to step out of our preconceived ways of seeing things and open so large that it can see the oneness in an ant and in an elephant.

Shut up and write. Don't talk about writing, just physically do it.