And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.

I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.

The Internet is a big distraction. It's distracting, it's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere.

The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.

He says I'm a regular onion! I keep him busy peeling away the layers.

[He] was always here to offer cups of good clear Walden Pond, or shout down the deep well of Shakespeare and listen, with satisfaction, for echoes. Here the lion and the hartebeest lay together, here the jackass became a unicorn.

I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?