Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.

Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.

The materials of true poetry are always humble, absolutely idiosyncratic, the autobiographical tatters that, in gifted hands, are made into the memoir that fits us all.

I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.

Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.

You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.

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.