You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

I finally understood that I didn’t lack pen and paper but my own memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking, a great human gift disowned.

Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.