and did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did.

It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.

Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.

There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.

There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.

I’d like to go out in the front yard and shout something. “None of this is worth it!” That’s what I’d like people to hear.