Another Mexican American in another class, approaches Victor after class, carrying his copy of Fahrenheit 451, required reading for the course. The student doesn’t understand the reference to a salon. Victor explains that this is...

pencils racing across paper, a sound I like.” Marisol

Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.

When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent...

There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.

[On Chopin’s Preludes:]”His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night...

Trust is such a huge word. It either makes something or destroy it.

Music is, for me, like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together. He takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them into the world, and we have to recreate the picture from the...

Haiku is not a shriek, a howl, a sigh, or a yawn; rather, it is the deep breath of life.

Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then...

Real haiku is the soul of poetry. Anything that is not actually present in one’s heart is not haiku. The moon glows, flowers bloom, insects cry, water flows. There is no place we cannot find...

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

It’s very similar in composition, with very similar textures when you look at it with a microscope, but it’s dipping in all different directions. What it says is that the geology around here is pretty...

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work … the cat...

Lines are results, do not draw them for themselves. … Lines give birth to lines. Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing. … Make a...

The Author To Her BookThou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,Who after birth did’st by my side remain,Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true,Who thee abroad exposed to public view,Made thee in...

When composing a verse let there not be a hair’s breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree...

…anyone still attempting to argue that Ebonics is a problem for black students or that it is somehow connected to a lack of intelligence or lack of desire to achieve is about as useful as...

A poet, you see, is a light thing, and winged and holy, and cannot compose before he gets inspiration and loses control of his senses and his reason has deserted him.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving...

Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.

I am in the world only for the purpose of composing.Franz Schubert