... but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.

No matter how many compromises were made along the way, no matter what happens in the future, a book is a thing to behold.

Indeed, the great paradox of the writer's life is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people.

I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from?.

But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world.

The writer labors in isolation, yet all that intensive, lonely work is in the service of communicating, is an attempt to reach another person.

[I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change. The courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference. I still didn't know the difference.

Nothing was a more powerful compass of my mood or a better indication of my self-worth than the number on the scale.

...but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

Without moral and intellectual independence, there is no anchor for national independence.

After Wakefield Poole's films, mine are unnecessary and a bit naive, don't you think?

Women are not ladies. The term connotates females who are simultaneously put on a pedestal and patronized.

Poetry is road maintenance for a fragmented world which seeks to be kept together. It's been an integral activity for a long time.

Apparently Jamie is great at being soft and hard at the same time. Which is hard to do for an actor! He's going to get an Oscar!

Those who regarded the revolution, during Imam Khomeini's time, as a deviation, are now [wielding] the tools of terror and oppression

Look up there! That's the sky!

I eye Chuy like a pitcher in baseball does when a guy leads too far off base.

[Senators John Kerry & John Edwards] have risen high in Democratic polls with a brand of class resentment and soak-the-rich rhetoric rooted in the old-fashioned liberalism of Ted Kennedy.

Remember that consciousness is power. Tomorrow's world is yours to build.