As a life’s work, I would remember everything – everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
I’m a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins.
It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.
I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one’s mind.
Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
The surest sign of age is loneliness.
How can people think that artists seek a name? There is no such thing as an artist – only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.
I can’t dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can’t do anything anymore.
No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
It makes more sense to write one big book – a novel or nonfiction narrative – than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.
Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.
If you’re going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.