Many & most moments go by with us hardly aware of their passage. But love & hate & fear cause time to snag you, to drag you down like a spider's web holding fast to a doomed fly's wings. And when you're caught like that you're aware of every moment & movement & nuance.

Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it's like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that's still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.

Rest easy and go with the faith you lived with

Chirren [children] is the most dangerous creatures on the earth, with the exception of young girls between the ages of fifteen and forty-two.

I never really thought I'd be successful. I never though I'd get books published, but this was something completely beyond me. The fact that it happened is wonderful, but it is not something that I was aiming for.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

Love makes you blind to your own survival. And if it doesn't then it's not love at all.