That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

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

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.

What good are insights? They only make things worse.

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.

Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.

You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?