“To be a writer and know the pain of artistic block is to know real frustration (though it's not quite as bad as constipation)!”

“Bucky Katt: A bad writer is just a good writer with writer's block.”

“The real is the poem. Hence, for the poet—our figure for the writer as artist—to write is to get real.”

“A writer discovers what he knows as he knows it, i.e., as he makes it. No artist writes in order to objectify an “idea” already formed. It is the poem or novel or story that quite precisely tells him what he didn't know he knew: he knows, that is, only in terms of his writing. This is, of course, simply another way of saying that literary composition is not the placing of a held idea into a waiting form.”

“Real life is not quite as it is in stories. In the old tales, bad things happen, and when the tale has unfolded and come to its triumphant conclusion, it is as if the bad things had never been. Life is not as simple as that, not quite.”

“Actually, it's as if [Superman is] more real than we are. We writers come and go, generations of artists leave their interpretations, and yet something persists, something that is always Superman.”