“Music is the highest art, no question. But literature is a friendlier one. It depends on us more, bores us more quickly, can't go on if we don't, can't stop saying what it means, can't stop giving us something to forgive.”

“To me the great divide is between the talkative and the quiet. Do they just say everything that's on their minds, even before it's on their minds? Sometimes I think I could just turn up my head like a Walkman so what's going on there could be heard by others. But there would still be a difference. For inside the head they are talking to people like them, and I am talking to someone like me: he is quiet and doesn't much like being talked at; he can't conceal how easily he gets bored.”

“On Writing: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays 1. A beginning ends what an end begins. 2. The despair of the blank page: it is so full.3. In the head Art’s not democratic. I wait a long time to be a writer good enough even for myself. 4. The best time is stolen time.5. All work is the avoidance of harder work. 6. When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.7. I envy music for being beyond words. But then, every word is beyond music.8. Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?9. The poem in the quarterly is sure to fail within two lines: flaccid, rhythmless, hopelessly dutiful. But I read poets from strange languages with freedom and pleasure because I can believe in all that has been lost in translation. Though all works, all acts, all languages are already translation. 10. Writer: how books read each other.11. Idolaters of the great need to believe that what they love cannot fail them, adorers of camp, kitsch, trash that they cannot fail what they love. 12. If I didn’t spend so much time writing, I’d know a lot more. But I wouldn’t know anything.13. If you’re Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you’re not? More than enough.14. Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity you make a new smear.15. There are silences harder to take back than words.16. Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery.17. I need a much greater vocabulary to talk to you than to talk to myself.18. Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.19. Believe stupid praise, deserve stupid criticism.20. Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost self-propelled at the end. Actually, it’s more like doing a puzzle from a box in which several puzzles have been mixed. Starting out, you can’t tell whether a piece belongs to the puzzle at hand, or one you’ve already done, or will do in ten years, or will never do. 21. Minds go from intuition to articulation to self-defense, which is what they die of.22. The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a passage, a whole book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday.23. To feel an end is to discover that there had been a beginning. A parenthesis closes that we hadn’t realized was open).24. There, all along, was what you wanted to say. But this is not what you wanted, is it, to have said it?”

“Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean. ”

“We can't stop the world,but there's so much more that we could doYou can't stop this girlfrom falling more in love with youYou said nobody has to know Give us time to grow, and take it slowbut I'd stop the world if it finally let us be aloneLet us be alone oooo ohhh oh”

“What is more yours than what always holds you back?”

“We stare into each other's eyes and softly kiss speaking and saying more with the movement of our lips and the tips of our fingers than words will allow us to say. Words can't say this. The one word love means too little for what it is. It means everything and that is still not enough. It doesn't communicate even a fraction of the feelings involved. Love. The word is not enough for what it is. Love. Love.”