Writing about why you write is a funny business, like scratching what doesn't itch. Impulses are mysterious, and explaining them must be done with mirrors, like certain cunning slight-of-hand routines.

Here, in memory, we live and die.

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.

People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.

The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more valuable one is the ancient function of metaphor, as it was of alchemy.

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