“There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.”

“Letters...People do not write the truth; they write the things that, they believe, you would like to read.”

“To write poetry, like sincere poetry, it is like performing heart surgery on yourself without anesthesia…in public…You are peeling back layers. You are dissecting yourself…You do not know what they [the audience] is going to do when you reach into yourself and rip out your organs to be displayed”

“You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.”

“You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you”

“You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.”