My wife and daughter have accused me of being too silent at breakfast but I don't want to talk when I don't have much to say.

You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel.

Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.

Domesticity has been a challenge for me but painful as it's been, engaging with family has been a school for reducing solipsism and increasing my understanding of people's different reactions to stress.

I've had an enduring appreciation of psychology.

It bothers me when I can't, for example, remember a name. I don't know if it's pre-senility or whether there are too many names packed in our brains.

Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent.