I’m a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I’ve left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.
But most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want. My heart is more duplicitous, though no twin as I once thought. It says, I want, I don’t want, I want, and then a pause. It forces me to listen...
I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.
I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.
In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys.
Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out.
All writers must go from now to once a upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.
Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.
When we’re young, we like happy endings. When we’re a little older, we think happy endings are unrealistic and so we prefer bad but credible endings. When we’re older still, we realize happy endings aren’t so bad after all.
Poetry isn’t written from the idea down. It’s written from the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from what your teacher taught you to do in school.
The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.
It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.
Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.
If you disagree with your government, that’s political. If you disagree with your government that is approaching theocracy, then you’re evil.
The facts of this world seen clearly are seen through tears.
A suicide is both a rebuke to the living and a puzzle that defies them to solve it. Like a poem, suicide is finished and refuses to answer questions as to its final cause.
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backwards in time and exist in two places at once.
Some travelers think they want to go to foreign places but are dismayed when the places turn out actually to be foreign.
For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it.