“I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out. ”

“The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how de...”

“I knew what he felt. The huge buoyant air sack of love that filled his body had just exploded and the collapse was devastating.”

“Nudity and explicit sex are far more easily available now than are clear images of death. The quasi-violence of movies and television dwells on the lively acts of killing flying kicks, roaring wea...”

“'The Iliad' includes some snappy sports reporting, and writers ever since have been probing athletes for signifiers, for metaphor amped by grit under pressure.”

“Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

“Goodnight! Goodnight! Parting is such sweet sorrow That I shall say goodnight 'til it be morrow.”

“Man's feelings are always purest and most glowing in the hour of meeting and of farewell.”

“Visits always give pleasure - if not the arrival the departure.”