“One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.”
“Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.”
“The job of the writer isn't to answer questions. The job of the writer is to ask the questions for which there are no answers.”
“It takes a child to say the unsayable.”
“Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.”
“An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.”