I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

Time, we like to say, cures all. But maybe the old saying doesn’t mean time heals. Time cures a secret in its brine, keeping it and finally, paradoxically, destroying it. Nothing is left in that salt solution but the pain or rage, the biting shame that lodged it there. Even they are diluted or denied.

We only store in memory images of value. To write about one's life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical.

poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.

Pondering was the highest vocation... Pondering was a special kind of thinking. It was not done in the mind, that chilly place, but in the heart, where the real mystery of intelligence - intuition - rather than thought lay catlike and feminine, ready to pounce.