Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.

A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write.

You don't know what you're doing. You're just hoping that people won't make fun of you. I had no idea how it would turn out.

Once you have learned to trust your own voice and allowed that creative force inside you to come out, you can direct it to write short stories, novels, and poetry, do revisions, and so on. You have the basic tool to fulfill your writing dreams. But beware. This type of writing will uncover other dreams you have, too-going to Tibet, being the first woman president of the United States, building a solar studio in New Mexico-and they will be in black and white. It will be harder to avoid them.

I don't know anything but writing practice, and so what I really do is direct that energy as if it were flowing down a river.

While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.