I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit.

Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.

God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?

The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words.

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.

Antoine St. Exupery once mourned the loss of a man and the secret treasures that he held inside him. I loved Exupery; I will read him again, and he will talk to me, not being dead, or gone. Is that life after death — mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? Maybe. I do not know.

There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.