The trick is to realize that one is not important, except insofar as one’s example can serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish.

Most good essays are conversations with yourself - not just your decided thoughts but your dilemmas.

In new work, we need to see the shadow, however faint, of previous literary effort.

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.

I imagined a psychic pain growing inside him (myself) that demanded some physical outlet. Suicide must have been his attempt to give Pain a body, a representation, to put it outside himself. A need to convert inner torment into some outward tangible wound that all could see. It was almost as though suicide were a last-ditch effort at exorcism, in which the person sacrificed his life in order that the devil inside might die.

For most of my life, I have wanted broad impact but now, at 72, I'm not so sure that's always my first priority.

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