There are worse words than cuss-words, there are words that hurt.

I don't want to die leaving the world as it is right now.

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

Better mankind born without mouths and stomachs than always to worry about money to buy, to shop, to fix, to cook, to wash, to clean.

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.

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

Writers in a profit making economy are an exploitable commodity whose works are products to be marketed, and are so judged and handled.