Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.

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

And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn't hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.

there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.

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.

Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.