“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”

“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”

“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”

“Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of gen...”

“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and...”

“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”

“All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.”

“The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.”

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”

“Literature is language charged with meaning”

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”