“Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

“Master Michelangelo once said that ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’ This is what we must do when we see an ignorant man: To set him free from the black marble we call ignorance!”

“I wish I was like that. More carefree.""Anyone can be. People aren't carved out of marble. We're all works in progress. The trick is to define ourselves, rather than let outside influences define us.”

“This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in character do not readily help the writer's hand to set down a sentence of that order. For though characters must take things in their own stride – somewhere in his story the writer cannot hold back this sentence that judges them. He wants it unobtrusive to his pace and the characters that caused him to write. The difficulty is to judge without seeming to be there, with a finality in the words that will make them casual and part of the story itself, except perhaps to another age.”

“The story is told of Michelangelo being asked about his methods for sculpting.He replied simply that he worked on a block of marble, removing all that was notpart of the sculpture until only the sculpture remained. I suspect this oversimplifiesthe art of sculpture, but it’s an excellent analogy for photography, which isessentially an art of exclusion.”

“You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.”