“When I can’t write I read. When I can’t read I sleep. And when I can’t sleep I write.”

“I don’t write poetry when I wish, I write when I can’t, when my larynx is flooded and my throat is shut.”

“I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.”

“I miss you when you’re not around,’ he said. ‘I can’t sleep when you’re not next to me, and I worry a lot about what you’re up to.”

“Writing isn’t my life…it’s a lovely part of my life... but it’s not my life. My life is family, friends, fishing, food…things like reading and painting and all the rest of it, and you can’t really prioritize when you’re involved with family or you’re involved in fishing, you can’t say, ‘Oh, I really should be writing.”

“I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?”