“What a pity. How the starsand seas and riversin their fragile lace of foggo on without usmorning after morning,year after year.And we disappear.”

“It is a kind of love, is it not?How the cup holds the tea,How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,How the floor receives the bottoms of shoesOr toes. How soles of feet knowWhere they're supposed to be.I've been thinking about the patienceOf ordinary things, how clothesWait respectfully in closetsAnd soap dries quietly in the dish,And towels drink the wetFrom the skin of the back.And the lovely repetition of stairs.And what is more generous than a window?”

“I loved county fairs in the South. It was hard to believe that anything could be so consistently cheap and showy and vulgar year after year. each year I thought that at least one class act would force its way into a booth or sideshow, but I was always mistaken. The lure of the fair was the perfect harmony of its joyous decadence, its burned-out dishonored vulgarity, its riot of colors and smells, its jangling, tawdry music, and its wicked glimpse into the outlaw life of hucksters, tattoo parlors, monstrous freaks, and strippers.”

“How will you feel when you're being swallowed up?”

“Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.”

“It's just human. We all have the jungle inside of us. We all have wants and needs and desires, strange as they may seem. If you stop to think about it, we're all pretty creative, cooking up all these fantasies. it's like a kind of poetry.”

“No matter how screwed up life is today, today is just a collection of moments that stop and start where you want them to. And nothing upsetting matters when you know tomorrow's gonna be better than yesterday”