[T]he one thing I want for you is to recognize when you are really singing in writing practice and honor that. Trust that. When you were screaming on the page. Maybe that doesn't make a whole book but that is the true seed.

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

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

When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn't leave you.

Poetry has never been a favorite American pastime.

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go. And don't worry too much about security. You will eventually have a deep security when you begin to do what you want.