I had not read George Eliot, so read a few. I felt ashamed I hadn't read "Middlemarch" before.

I can't believe there is a poet who hasn't eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It's part of the process of selection.

I never read Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier." I've been reading books that I should have read years ago and did not. That's one of them.

Reading a good poem can give me a far bigger kick than a novel. But it's not something I can keep doing. It would be like shooting up 10 times a day.

There are many reasons for violence. This is just something that sometimes happens. We'd see it in treatment centers - the child who'd suffered something awful. Even in the best recovery there'd be a fear that everything would fall apart and they'd become victims again. And their final loyalty was to themselves. They couldn't be forced. They preferred to wreck everything, preferred self-destruction to surrender. (175)

One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.

It was as if pain were a room he had entered and the door had been locked behind him.