“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't li...”

“There is the inner life, which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time like the heartbeat. T...”

“It is not enough to say the crow flies purposefully, or heavily, or rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness in the crow's flight. All we can do is use a...”

“He could not stand. It was notThat he could not thrive, he was bornWith everything but the will That can be deformed, just like a limb.Death was more interesting to him.Life could not get his atten...”

“The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reco...”

“I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a...”

“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and immediately all my biggest fears start running through my mind. I wonder if my fears will one day be my new reality. The fears seem so real. I str...”

“You may be a poet and not even know it.”

“Destroy your life; then put it back together.You'll get great material, meet some fascinating characters and side benefit the skills you develop will give you greater compassion, insight and rang...”

“The more interest you show in your spouse, the more interest your spouse will show in you.”

“Man is encased, as though in a shell, in the particular ranking of the simplest values and value-qualities which represent the objective side of his *ordo amoris*, values which have not yet been sh...”

“I knew people were talking, but I wasn't listening. I wasn't interested in anything anyone had to say.”

“Semua orang pernah patah hati. All you have to do is move on.”

“A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.”

“If you only write when youre inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but youll never be a novelist because youre going to have to make your word count today and those words arent going to wait fo...”