“Be patient, work hard and consistently, have faith in your writing, and don't be afraid to listen to constructive criticism.”

“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.”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“Worry is like a rocking-chair. It gives you something to do buy gets you nowhere.”

“But if that was going to happen, it was going to happen whether or not he worried about it.”

“Perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.”

“The problem of society is that they use a single word to describe you.”

“Beastliness means taking that is unrightful [of someones else right], eating that is unrightful, thinking of accumulating things which is unrightful [not of ones own right]. There is no problem in ...”

“The only problem is time.”