“The longer I live here, the better satisfied I am in having pitched my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one side, and the green fields, lanes, and woods on the other. Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go to town--to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal.”

“One: I am proud to say that my vampires do not sparkle.Two: I feel like in literature that we've gone [this way] towards the kissing vampires side of the needle. I think it's time we go back towards the killing vampires side of the needle.”

“I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere.”

“Ultimately, I found my instincts mirrored in a line from Thoreau: 'My needle...always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more exhausted and richer on that side.”

“It would hardly benefit me to hold anything back unnecessarily, when I know what I'm asking. For you to find a needle in--God, not even a haystack. A needle in a tower full of other needles.”

“Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.”