Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.

With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.

The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.

I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.

There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

Every kind of prayer, not intercessory prayer only, which is the highest kind of prayer, but all prayer, from the lowest kind to the highest, is impossible in a life of known and allowed sin.

I think actors are at the mercy of the opportunities presented to them. So you kind of have to wait for them to choose you. My music is insular - I can choose that.

The ultimate purpose of our life is to rejoin God in conscious participation of divinity.

Compromise today is too often applauded simply for itself. The cost of compromise to principles and real lives doesn't seem to matter.

The contour should come last, only a very experienced eye can place it rightly.

For if you train hard and responsibly your confidence surges to a maximum

That earns him a smack with my book bag. "Ow." He clutches his arm. "What do you have in there? Books?" A grin snakes across his face. "I like my women feisty." He adds, "I like my broken.

Inspiration is in seeing a part of the whole with the part of the whole in you.

I'd visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon.

True success in any endeavor can only come when the Father has initiated the activity and invited our participation.