If someone in my family is getting emotionally bent out of shape, I've had to learn to adapt..

Indeed, at times it's best to shut up..

Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent..

For most of my life, I have wanted broad impact but now, at 72, I'm not so sure that's always my first priority..

I imagined a psychic pain growing inside him (myself) that demanded some physical outlet. Suicide must have been his attempt to give Pain a body, a r….

Have fun writing, because it enhances both the writer's and reader's experience..

In new work, we need to see the shadow, however faint, of previous literary effort..

The essay is a wonderful medium. I might mention that some writers who longed to be novelists were better as essayists: Sontag, Baldwin, Vidal, Mary ….

I really do like to write and when I'm not, I think, "Okay, I'll be a good citizen now" but fact is, that's secondary..

I like the freedom that comes with lowered expectations..

Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot..

Think of a dinner party as a club of revolutionaries, a technocratic elite whose social interactions that night are a dry run for some future takeove….