I am certainly not allergic to causes - particularly on subjects such as religious intolerance.

Good music is good music, but it has to be good.

I rarely listen to music while writing. If I don't like it, it bothers me, and if I like it, it absorbs me so much I can't write.

I don't pick and choose subjects or settings; they pick and choose me.

In a painting, you can't make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist's stroke.

Of course, the greater one's need, the greater one's propensity to be mesmerized.

Everyone sort of sees his own life and times as being ephemeral. One thinks that everything good or important that happened, happened in the past. But I think that seeing scenes that you are used to, but with the heightening effects of poetry, perhaps makes you value your life and times more than you might otherwise do.