I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.

My parents are like younger, urchinlike brothers and sisters whose faces are dirty and who blurt out humiliating things that can neither be anticipated nor controlled. I sigh and make the best of it. I...

. . . time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee. . . . I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

He’s a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man...

It’s simple,’ Kat told them. ‘You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You’re working with the gap between reality...

If your not annoying somebody, you’re not alive.

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...

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

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.

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...