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.

The essay is a wonderful medium. I might mention that some writers who longed to be novelists were better as essayists: Sontag, Baldwin, Vidal, Mary McCarthy, Mailer.

Have fun writing, because it enhances both the writer's and reader's experience.

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.

The knowledge that my discriminations are skewed and not always universally desirable doesn't stop me in the least from making them.

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.