Not to have an audience is a kind of death.

Lighting does occasionally strike and occasional the result isn't a corpse.

Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.

I know that I haven’t powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates.

It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched.

Time granted does not necessarily coincide with time that can be most fully used.

It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil.