If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.

Don’t complain, don’t explain.

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it