I still try to keep my eyes open. I’m always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I’ve not seen one.
Write as if you are dying.
The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
The interior life is often stupid.
The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.
The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.
The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.
Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
It should surprise no one that the life of the writer – such as it is – is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
Your feelings are none of your business.
A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order – willed, faked, and so brought into being.
You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.