I share Einstein’s affirmation that anyone who is not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe “is as good as a burnt out candle.”
The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.
We tend to think things are new because we’ve just discovered them.
To grow up is to accept vulnerability. To be alive is to be vulnerable.
Are anybody’s parents typical?
If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.
I do not believe that true optimism can come about except through tragedy.
No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed.
Sometimes idiosyncrasies which used to be irritating become endearing, part of the complexity of a partner who has become woven deep into our own selves.
When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity.
With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.
We do not know and cannot tell when the spirit is with us. Great talent or small, it makes no difference. We are caught within our own skins, our own sensibilities; we never know if our technique has been adequate to the vision.
There is little character or loveliness in the face of someone who has shunned risk, avoided suffering and rejected life.
A great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is. It is a vehicle of truth, but it is not a blueprint, and we tend to confuse the two.
We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink.
I rebel against death, yet I know that it is how I respond to death’s inevitability that is going to make me less or more fully alive.
The medieval mystics say the true image and the true real met once and for all on the cross: once and for all: and yet they still meet daily.
Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.
Give the public the ‘image’ of what it thinks it ought to be, or what television commercials or glossy magazine ads have convinced us we ought to be, and we will buy more of the product, become closer to the image, and further from reality.
A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.