Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.

As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice.

Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.

We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.

It's extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can't get a job on a ship unless you have seaman's paper's, and you can't get seaman's papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me.