Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away.

A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.

Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

i wish i was away in Ingo far across the briny sea sailing over deepest waters where neither care nore worry trouble me

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.

It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

Nothing can replace your time and your strength.

The single greatest tool for making moral people commit atrocities is group affiliation. The single greatest tool for promoting global human rights and equality is to end group affiliation.

May we know fear, but may we always refuse to court cowardice.

The next thing you think, the next action you take, will either create a new possibility for you, or it will repeat the past.

Anything you can settle with money is cheap.

Id rather be biblically correct than politically correct.

You are what you dream you are and become. And, I wish Americans would get out of the sickness and just become greater.

When you tell other people to do stuff they don't know how to do, they tend to freak out.

Cost does not equal value... and low cost parts decrease brand equity for a very long time.