There is always a part of my mind that is preparing for the worst, and another part of my mind that believes if I prepare enough for it, the worst won’t happen.
My soul is now her day, my day her night, So I lie down, and so I rise.
King Arthur was one of my heroes - I played with a trash can lid for a knightly shield and my uncle's cane for the sword Excalibur.
Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.
There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.
Rich or poor, every child comes into the world with some imperative need of its own, which shapes its individuality.
If you find something to tell, tell it to your truest, though that make little to tell; the truer you speak, the more you will know to tell.
In Mozart and Salieri we see the contrast between the genius which does what it must and the talent which does what it can.
There is a vast difference between games and play. Play is played for fun, but games are deadly serious and you do not play them to enjoy yourself.
I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.
The Temple of Diana is in the vicinity of the fountain, which has given rise to the conjecture that it originally constituted a portion of the ancient baths.
The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.
I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.
The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.
There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.
Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.
My parents say that even as a very, very little kid, the way that I acted was dramatically different from other little kids.
I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance.
I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer.
The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it's physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker.
