If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.
A daydreamer is prepared for most things.
The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.
I’m drawn to failure. I feel that I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.
Death is just the last scene of the last act.
Loneliness is like starvation: you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it’s the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct.
I don’t think that writer’s block exists really. I think that when you’re trying to do something prematurely, it just won’t come. Certain subjects just need time, as I’ve learned over and over again. You’ve got to wait before you write about them.
Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.
Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.
Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.
Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.
Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.
I had forgotten that time wasn’t fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.
As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my ‘farm chores’ – but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.
For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.
Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.
Your punishment if you’re a woman. Not loved enough.
I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people’s lives when they go in one direction, not another.