When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should ‘teach writing,’ which I have no idea how to do and don’t really believe in.
I don’t know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That’s where the mind moves, that’s what’s new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people’s heads for a long time.
I don’t read reviews and I don’t know what to do with opinions, so I just lose them. They take up space, they become a process of manufacturing a persona, which I want to avoid.
Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.
All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life.
Small, red, and upright he waited, gripping his new bookbag tight in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other, while the first snows of winter floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced all trace of the world.
Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-.
What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure.
The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.
M: Is he smart I: She yes very smart sees right through me M: In my day we valued blindness rather more.
Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.
He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
There is no person without a world.
You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.
A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.
Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it’s more scary to draw. It’s more revealing. You can’t disguise yourself in drawing.
You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.
Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.