Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference-the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.

I'm a writer in the world. I translate the confusion that I might feel, the dread that I know I feel, moving towards some other place, moving away from puny language, from all that dread into some other kind of language.

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*

I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.