“Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.”

“A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state by means of words.”

“...she acted as a kind of rough and ready chemical reagent; in certain combinations she produced certain known results.”

“Modernity could be identified with the gradual disappearance of ritual, of those kind of communal bonds founded upon a symbolically shared sense of guilt.”

“Get yourself in that intense state of being next to madness. Keep yourself in, not necessarily a frenzied state, but in a state of great intensity. The kind of state you would be in before going to bed with your partner. That heightened state when you're in a carnal embrace: time stops and nothing else matters. You should always write with an erection. Even if you're a woman.”

“And afterwards, if you had asked any of the survivors how they had managed it, they would not have been able to tell you. It was as if those days in the forest, the escape to the city, had passed in a trance. The mind creates an alternative state.”