Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.
Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson.
I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.
I don’t write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn’t be any adventure. It wouldn’t have any vitality.
It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order.
You have to figure out who the right person is to tell the story. And often, people who are very self-aware will only sound as if they are pontificating if they tell the story.
I don’t even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.
It’s often been said that I’m an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I’ve never known what to make of that.
When I lived in New York, not only did I have safety locks on the door but I had the music going, keeping the city at a distance, trying to find creative time and peace and so forth.
When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn’t even know how to aim the camera in those days.
It’s gratifying that it does; I love to give readings.
I am not alone in bearing grudges against reviewers who have doomed a book’s chances because they’ve missed the point, the tone, everything...
The admiration of another writer’s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style.
Women are obviously much more discriminated against than men in many ways.
Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.
You put a character out there and you’re in their power. You’re in trouble if they’re in yours.
What will happen can’t be stopped. Aim for Grace.
Falling in Place was meant to be very much rooted in a place and time, and music was a part of that.
If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don’t think I’d have trouble doing that.
It’s interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.