with shrunken fingerswe ate our oranges and bread,shivering in the parked car;though we know we had neverbeen there before,we knew we had been there before.

I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.

The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.

Money does talk, but it has a limited vocabulary.

You’re sad because you’re sad.It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical.Go see a shrink or take a pill,or hug your sadness like an eyeless dollyou need to sleep.Well, all children are sadbut some get over...

I’m sad now, the way we’re talking is infinitely sad: faded music, faded paper flowers, worn satin, an echo of an echo. All gone away, no longer possible.

That’s the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it’s logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal...

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.

The threat to the planet is us. It’s actually not a threat to the planet – it’s a threat to us.

O, lente, lente currite noctis equi!

Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so...

They are boiling with the pressured energy of explosive forces confined in a small space, and with the fervor of all religious movements in their early, purist stages. It is not enough to give lip...

Perfection exacts a price, but it’s the imperfect who pay it

Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they’ve learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of...

Girl Without HandsWalking through the ruinson your way to workthat do not look like ruinswith the sunlight pouring overthe seen worldlike hail or meltedsilver, that brightand magnificent, each leafand stone quickened and specific in it,and...

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter…

I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the...

UPYou wake up filled with dread.There seems no reason for it.Morning light sifts through the window,there is birdsong,you can’t get out of bed.It’s something about the crumpled sheetshanging over the edge like junglefoliage, the terry...

What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

You can think clearly only with your clothes on.

A writer’s age at the time of a work’s composition is never irrelevant.

When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That’s science fiction; it isn’t going to happen.

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.

I don’t think of poetry as a ‘rational’ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement...

I’m curious. If someone says ‘Don’t open that door’, I’m right there!

The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.

Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there’s no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.

There were a few other moves of his father’s he could do without as well – the sucker punches, the ruffling of the hair, the way of pronouncing the word son, in a slightly deeper...

Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.

If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she’d be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death’s a sure-fire method for stopping time.

Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they’re a mouthy lot and they don’t line up and salute very easily.

Not that it isn’t great to see you. But it’s not so great for you. What’d you do wrong? Laugh at his dick?

But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it...

I don’t want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have...

Human tool-makers always make tools that will help us get what we want, and what we want hasn’t changed for thousands of years because as far as we can tell the human template hasn’t changed...

nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. Look–my feet don’t hit the marble! Like breath or a balloon, I’m rising, I hover six inches in the air in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think...

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools...

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don’t know the plot. They don’t know their own individual plot… they don’t know what’s going to happen to them.

I’m bad at picking heroes.

She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she’s looked that way ever since she was two.

He’s very in depth, on the dark side. He’s interested in structure and how things work. After reading his books you can’t just be a tourist in those places, only seeing the sunny side.

I’m not senile,” I snapped. “If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.

Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as...

She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.