But in a still life, there is no end to our looking, which has become allied with the gaze of the painter; we look in and in, to the world of things, in their ambiance of cool or warm light, in and in, as long as we can stand to look, as long as we t...
I see little alteration at Lyons since I formerly passed through it. Its manufactories are, nevertheless, flourishing, though less improvement than could be expected is visible in the external aspect of the place.
Yes, the meeting of dear friends atones for the regret of separation; and like it so much enhances affection, that after absence one wonders how one has been able to stay away from them so long.
The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.
I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
I am often drawn to what appear at first to be 'dark' or 'difficult' subjects, but which, upon further examination, are always and only reflections of the ways human beings attempt, however clumsily, badly, or well, to connect with others.
'Write' is almost the wrong verb for what I do. I think 'compose' is more accurate because you're trying to make the sounds in your mind and in your voice. So I compose while I'm driving or in the shower.
New Jersey is the most poetic state: close enough to New York to be urban and cosmopolitan, far enough to be desirous and unsure; densely populated, but full of farms and woods, with the most deer of any state.
I am a frustrated saxophone player. If I could, I would abandon all of my books, and I would trade it all if I could play the way people I admire play.
A writer has a difficult fate, but a Jewish writer has an especially difficult fate. His soul is torn; he lives on two streets with three languages. It is a misfortune to live on this sort of 'border,' and that is what I have experienced.
A ghost is someone who hasn't made it - in other words, who died, and they don't know they're dead. So they keep walking around and thinking that you're inhabiting their - let's say, their domain. So they're aggravated with you.
The fault I find in our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other everyday, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.
For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely grief.
Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it ... There are certain cases of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline ... reintroducing a lazy mind into t...
No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.
Maybe I wanted to have kids because you want to leave behind lessons, leave behind everything that matters to you. That's how you touch the world. But I have to reconsider what it's like to leave a legacy.
People will come up to me everywhere and say, 'Ah, I saw you on 'Larry King,' and, 'Ah, I saw you on 'Oprah.' And it's really nice, and a lot of people say, 'Is it a pain?' And I say 'No.' And it's not annoying.
I read a lot of books about psychopaths. I read a wonderful book Amy Hempel gave me about the guy who created criminal profiling - a fascinating book, 'Mind Hunter.'
I grew up as an only child with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif.
Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.
The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.
