The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls….

The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence..

I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous a….

Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where hist….

Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our ….

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by..

Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump agai….

So the Midwest nourishes us [...] and presents us with the spectacle of a land and a people completed and certain. And so we run to our bedrooms and ….

I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never sl….

I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface and exit through it..

Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would ….

What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us….

There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could….

Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets..

How you spend your days is how you spend your life..

Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are for….

The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before..

When I was quite young I fondly imagined that all foreign languages were codes for English. I thought that "hat," say, was the real and actual name o….

Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine..

It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing th….

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all..