“I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful.”

“Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.”

“I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.”

“I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.”

“I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.”

“Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be signific...”

“Some people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said."Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.”

“I think if I've learned anything about friendship, it's to hang in, stay connected, fight for them, and let them fight for you. Don't walk away, don't be distracted, don't be too busy or tired, don...”

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

“People who make the choice to study, work hard or do whatever they endeavor is to give it the max on themselves to reach to the top level. And you have the people who get envy and jealous, yet are ...”

“Surround yourself with people who take their work seriously, but not themselves, those who work hard and play hard.”

“We need to steer clear of this poverty of ambition, where people want to drive fancy cars and wear nice clothes and live in nice apartments but don't want to work hard to accomplish these things. E...”

“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.”